A Late Phoenix

by Catherine Aird

  “It’ll take a bit of time, sir,” said Lightning.

  “I daresay,” said Sloan pleasantly.

  “Had one last Friday night. A girl last seen thumbing a lift from a lorry on the London Road.”

  “Not her.”

  “Bank Holiday we had one that had had a row with her dad about coming home late. Hasn’t been seen since.”

  “Before then,” said Sloan evenly.

  P.C. Lightning Brown started flicking through a file. Sloan didn’t think he could have done it more slowly if he’d tried.

  “Last November, sir, there was the treasurer of Corton’s Christmas Club.”

  “What happened to him?” asked Sloan in spite of himself.

  “Don’t rightly know, sir, but we found his clothes and a note on the cliffs above Kinnisport.” He sucked his lips expressively. “Funny how they always take their clothes off, isn’t it?”

  “Very.”

  “In 1949,” said Lightning Brown in measured tones, “there was one of our dentists. Walked out one night and was never seen again.”

  “Dull work, dentistry. Nothing but teeth all day.” Sloan thought of the dental picture that the pathologist would have waiting for him by now. Perhaps that would be a quicker way to a name than this.

  “He wasn’t the only one that night,” volunteered Lightning.

  “No?”

  “His girl went too.”

  “His girl?”

  The man scowled. “Chairside assistants they call themselves nowadays.”

  “Quite.” Somehow Sloan didn’t think the skeleton in Lamb Lane, however pregnant, was the dentist’s chairside assistant but he would have to make sure. He took down the details. It would have been a different story if the dentist hadn’t gone too.

  Quite a different story.

  He would have been much more interested then in the chair-side assistant missing since 1949. As Sloan saw it the bullet and the burial meant that someone wanted to stay.

  Not go.

  Wanted to stay badly enough to kill the lady in question before her baby was born and wanted to bury her so that nobody knew about either body or baby.

  Therefore someone who had a stake in being in Berebury?

  “Go on going back,” he commanded Lightning Brown.

  “Two more hitches on the London Road. If only,” he said in a grumbling way, “they’d write. Save us a lot of bother.”

  They never did.

  Sloan knew that.

  Whatever it was drove them away stopped them writing too. And those who were left at home could never see that. It was just those ties—or apron strings—or tentacles—that they wanted to break with in the first place. And having broken them didn’t want to join them neatly together again with the knot of a letter or an address.

  “Come home. All forgiven. Mum and Dad,” murmured Sloan.

  “Fido pining,” said the old constable cynically.

  “That’d bring ’em back quicker. Of course, there’s not a lot here for some of them.”

  Sloan could well believe that.

  The bucolic calm of an English market town wasn’t every teenager’s idea of the perfect adolescent environment. Not that the Lamb Lane lady had been a teenager. Dr. Dabbe had been sure about that. By the time you were twenty-three or so you had sorted out what you did want … you didn’t want a baby, of course, if you weren’t married.

  Especially in an English market town.

  Especially then.

  Lightning grunted. “That’s not what I think. That’s what their solicitors say when we catch one of them for doing a spot of the old wilful damage.”

  “And what, may I ask, does the magistrate say to that?” enquired Sloan.

  Nothing would surprise him about magistrates.

  Nothing.

  “Asks ever so politely if they wouldn’t rather be given the church windows to smash. Must be more exciting, he says, cool like, to break colored glass than just the plain plate glass stuff in the High Street shop windows. Keen on damages, he is.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” said Sloan. Though where damages got you with the Dick’s Dive mob he wouldn’t know. If they didn’t believe in wealth then fines were scarcely punishment. Possessing nothing which normal society valued made threatening to take it away so much hot air.

  Trying to explain this to the superintendent had been wasted breath, too.

  The disgruntled constable went back to his old files. “Then there was the war. You interested in the war, sir?”

  “Yes,” said Sloan for the first time in his life.

  “There were the deserters, of course. Always one or two of them making for home comforts. Premature demobilization with some of ’em. Wanted to get back.”

  “And civilians missing after air raids?”

  The constable shook his head. “Nobody like that unaccounted for, sir. Not here in Berebury.”

  “Sure?”

  P.C. Brown looked pained. “Dead sure, sir.”

  “Not even after the Wednesday?”

  “No. I was here myself, sir. I remember quite well.”

  Sloan sighed. There were some people, of course, who were never going to get promotion. You could tell right from the start. Lightning Brown must have been one of them. Even as a young man.

  “Nearest we came, sir, to a missing person or an unidentified body was a finger.”

  “A finger?” For a moment Sloan wondered if he was having his leg pulled.

  “That’s right, Inspector. I was on duty that night. The Wednesday, During the raid a chap brought his finger in to me. All done up in a napkin, it was, the wrapping of parcels not ’aving been allowed as from the fourteenth of the month.”

  “Nice for you.”

  “Very. Seems as if he’d taken it to the first-aid post near the church and they said they couldn’t do nothing with it on its own so to speak.”

  “Quite.”

  “So he popped it round to the mortuary …”

  “Did he?”

  “We were using the Italian ice cream parlor in River Street as a mortuary in those days, the bottom having fallen out of the market in a manner of speaking …”

  “Yes?” Whoever had nicknamed Police Constable Brown “Lightning” had done a good day’s work. Sloan hoped that he—whoever he was—had got promotion.

  Constable Crosby came back, notebook in hand. He’d got Leslie Waite’s address.

  “Due,” went on P.C. Brown unhurriedly, “to a shortage at the time of both Italians and ice cream.”

  “The finger,” prompted Sloan.

  “The mortuary wouldn’t touch it without a body belonging to it. Not their pigeon, they said. So he brought it round here to the station.”

  “What did you do with it?” asked Sloan, fascinated in spite of his better judgement.

  “Buried it beside Timoshenko out in the back yard.”

  “Who was Timoshenko?” inevitably.

  “The station cat. She was a lady cat as it happened, but this Russian general was very popular at the time.” Lightning Brown sniffed. “Next day another chap turns up and says the finger was his. He was one short naturally …”

  “Naturally.” In a minute Sloan would get up and walk out. The Ancient Mariner had nothing on P.C. Brown.

  “Seems as if he was chopping wood when Moaning Minnie went and the axe slipped. He’d nipped off to the hospital before this other chap came along.”

  “And there was nobody else missing?”

  “Nobody else, Inspector.” He shut the file. “Except a young lady who wrote from a well-known address north of the Border …”

  “I’ll buy it.”

  “Gretna Green. I don’t suppose you want to know about her.”

  “Just for the record.” Sloan told Crosby to take down a Berebury name and address. “You never know.”

  “It’ll have changed again,” said Lightning Brown pessimistically. “That sort of marriage doesn’t last.”

  “Sir,” said Crosby
as they left the Records Department, “who’s Moaning Minnie?”

  “A siren, Constable.”

  “Is she, sir?”

  “A warning siren,” he said swiftly. “Meaning danger overhead.”

  Sloan stared out of the car windows as Crosby drove out of Berebury towards Kinnisport. He had no idea what the time was. The day had somehow slipped away, unmarked by food, unpunctuated by any clock. When he was going to eat next was anybody’s guess.

  So was where he was going to pluck information about an old bullet in an old body.

  Before as he had gone about his business in Berebury he had merely been subconsciously aware of the casual intermingling of old and new houses and shops. Today Sloan looked at them with new eyes as he realized for the first time that this randomness was the randomness of bombing.

  The new buildings—the postwar buildings—suddenly irritated him. They were an intrusion. He was only interested in old Berebury now. Then the police car swung away from angular unmellowed brick and overdone plate glass and out onto the main road west to Kinnisport.

  Leslie Waite was obviously younger than his brother Harold. Younger and more carefree.

  They ran him to earth shortly after opening time in a tiny fisherman’s pub on the waterfront.

  Already the little bar was crowded and noisy. “Let’s try the table in the corner,” Waite shouted above the hubbub. “Quieter.”

  He led the way across, glass in hand. The attractive youngish woman with him came too. “The wife,” he said.

  She smiled.

  “Sit down here, Inspector,” said Waite. “You did say you were an inspector, didn’t you?”

  “I did.”

  “And you’ve come over from Berebury to see me?”

  “That’s right, sir. About a strange discovery in Lamb Lane.”

  “Something nasty in the woodshed?”

  “In the cellar, sir.” Sloan looked round. The whole place was full of sailors and fishermen and their wives.

  “Don’t worry, Inspector. A crowd’s the best place for a quiet chat.” Leslie jerked his shoulder towards the bar. “Fellow over there thought he’d have a private row with his wife out in their boat. The whole mooring heard every word. Better than a play actually …”

  “Sound does travel over open water,” agreed Sloan.

  “Tell me, Inspector,” said Mrs. Waite, “what was in the cellar?”

  Sloan told her, omitting the pregnancy and the bullet. Leslie Waite plunged his face into his beer mug.

  “And you’ve got no shortage of bodies on the books so to speak?”

  “No, sir. As it happens we haven’t.”

  “A skeleton, eh? Well, well …”

  “A woman’s skeleton …”

  Leslie Waite sat back on the pub bench, quite relaxed. “I was at sea when the house was bombed.”

  “I’ll make a note of that”

  “Came home on leave to find the place a shambles. First thing I knew was when I got one of my own letters back marked Gone Away.” He gave a short laugh. “It was the address that had gone away.”

  “Your father,” said Sloan, “appears to have been quite unaware of the skeleton when he willed the house to your brother …”

  Leslie Waite’s face changed. It was no longer quite so relaxed. “You’ve looked that up, have you?”

  “Yes, sir. A skeleton—er—requires investigation.”

  “Harold was always the white-haired boy. I was always the black sheep.” He swept up the glasses from the table. “Quite sure you’re not drinking, Inspector?”

  “Quite sure, sir, thank you,” said Sloan.

  Crosby said nothing.

  “I’m afraid I sowed a few wild oats too many for the old man.”

  “I see, sir.” In Sloan’s opinion Hasse’s rule was measuring someone’s wild oat all right but he didn’t know if it was Leslie Waite’s or not.

  Yet.

  Certainly there had been no visible pricking of the ears by Leslie Waite at the mention of missing persons as there had been with Harold. But that might be because Harold had already warned him. He’d had several hours in which to do it and families were funny things. However divisive among themselves they were usually united against the police.

  “He thought I was never going to make a go of anything when I came out of the Navy.” Leslie pointed a thumb towards the sea. “As the only thing I wanted to do was mess about in boats perhaps the old chap was right.”

  There was a sudden burst of laughter from the bar. Leslie edged his way into the barman’s ambit and came back with another beer.

  “Do you go over to Luston much?” asked Sloan casually.

  “And run the risk of conversion by my sanctimonious sister-in-law, Inspector? Not on your life!”

  “Or Berebury?”

  He shook his head. “No. No point in going to Berebury when you can have days like today in Kinnisport, eh, Doreen?”

  “None.”

  “Wind right. Tide right. Heaven.”

  Doreen Waite smiled. “Couldn’t have been better.”

  “You do a lot of sailing, sir?”

  Leslie Waite nodded vigorously. “Every day if I can. Not like the poor Saturday and Sunday blokes.”

  “And the rest of the time?”

  “When I’m not sailing? I work in a boat builder’s yard. Unskilled. I’m not very good. Doreen’s the one that keeps us going.”

  “Nonsense.” Doreen Waite flushed. “I’m only a secretary, Inspector.”

  “Anyway, it’s better than slaving away in a factory like old Harold. And hog-tied to a religious maniac into the bargain. He never got anywhere at all—for all that he got shot of Corton’s like the others.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “His pals Reddley and Hodge did pretty well for themselves by clearing out when they did. All Harold did was change one bench for another.” Leslie Waite ran his eyes lazily round the cozy little pub and put his free arm round his wife. He lifted his glass with his other arm. “But in the end I reckon I’ve done best of all.”

  “Really, sir?”

  “Really, Inspector. I’ve got what I want without working. You can’t beat that.”

  Detective Constable Crosby, once more behind the driving wheel, inclined his head to indicate Kinnisport fast receding behind him. “If that’s failure, sir, I’ll have it every time, thank you very much.”

  “His father cut him out of his will,” said Sloan.

  That was a fact.

  A demonstrable fact.

  Demonstrable facts were a little on the short side in the case at the moment and those that existed were mostly with the pathologist.

  A body.

  An unborn baby.

  And a bullet.

  Sloan stared out of the window without seeing anything: and decided he’d got the order wrong.

  An unborn baby, a bullet, and a body.

  That was more like it.

  The skeleton was there—on the post-mortem bench—but so far was unrelated to evidence in the police sense of that much misused word.

  “Sons don’t get left out of their father’s wills for nothing,” persisted Sloan.

  If you listened to the politicians it was this obstinate determination of citizens to leave their worldly goods to their biological—not their social—heirs that caused half the taxation problems in the country.

  Sloan didn’t listen to the politicians, of course. He was a policeman and nearer to life as it was lived.

  “That sort of failure’d suit me down to the ground.” Crosby changed down a gear for a bad bend.

  “Failure’s a relative thing …” That was something else you only learned as the years went by. Crosby wasn’t old enough yet, hadn’t been frustrated enough yet, hadn’t been disappointed enough yet …

  “Sails every day,” said Crosby, “works with boats, nice young wife. I shouldn’t mind …”

  “In the morning,” said Sloan, “you can check that she i
s his wife.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We will also check on whatever it was that made Leslie Waite a black sheep twenty-five years ago. Though,” he added morosely, “with the permissive society being what it is, I don’t suppose it’s even in the book any more.” He hunched his shoulders. “Still less anyone minding.”

  Not with Dick’s Dive clientele setting the pace.

  “No, sir. Shall we,” suggested Crosby sedulously, “be calling it a day now, sir?”

  “No, we will not, Crosby.”

  “But we’ll be coming to the Berebury junction in a tick, sir.”

  “Take the Luston Road.”

  “The Luston Road?”

  “What we want,” said Sloan flatly, “is a quiet word with Harold Waite without his wife being there.”

  “That’s not going to be easy, sir. Don’t suppose he ever nips out for a quick one. Not with a wife like that.”

  “You can bet your life he does,” said Sloan who was older and wiser. “He couldn’t manage without. Not with a wife like that.”

  “But must we go now, sir? After all,” he added unwisely, “it’s not as if it’s an important job.”

  “Not important, Constable?”

  “Not urgent then, sir,” amended Crosby. “It wasn’t as if all this was yesterday, is it?”

  “And what,” enquired Sloan majestically, “has time to do with crime?”

  Crush the shell

  CHAPTER NINE

  Dr. William Latimer was getting ready to leave the Feathers Hotel in Berebury. He had enjoyed his first meeting of the Caduceus Club more than he had expected he would.

  The hotel itself looked as if it had come straight out of an old-fashioned Christmas card, and he had parked his car in a quaint cobbled yard built long ago for horses.

  Before going inside he had straightened his tie, pulled down his waistcoat and braced himself for his first meeting with his fellow doctors—but there had been no need. The first club member he had met wasn’t even wearing a waistcoat. The second looked like a prosperous farmer in from the country and the third was dressed more like a bookie than a general practitioner.

  They had all been very friendly.

  “You must be Latimer.”

  William agreed that he was.

  “What are you drinking?”

  This dialogue was repeated up and down the room. By the end of the evening William decided he had met almost everyone present except a lanky chap with a bow tie, who had spent the whole time at the bar deep in converse with the only lady present.