A Late Phoenix

by Catherine Aird

  “Well?”

  Crosby scratched his chin. “If he was killed, too, sir, I’d say that that would mean that if this body was dug up he would have guessed who …”

  “Might have been able to guess,” modified Sloan automatically. Qualified statements were better in the long run than the categoric variety.

  “Might have been able to guess,” said Crosby agreeably “Like Harold Waite.”

  “And look what happened to him. Perhaps, Crosby, we’ve started from the wrong end …”

  “By the way,” said Sloan hastily, “there was something else I wanted to ask you, Doctor. Tell me, suppose you wanted to fake a hanging, how would you go about it?”

  “I’d garotte whoever it was,” responded Dabbe promptly. “From behind. Preferably while he’s bending down to do up his shoelace …”

  “Or picking up something you’ve just dropped accidentally on purpose,” suggested Sloan.

  “That’s the idea. Put your knee in the small of his back and heave. Remember to jerk your rope or what-have-you upwards as well as backwards. Then you’ll get your marks in the right place. That way it’s pretty difficult for the pathologist to tell … Sloan, are you trying to suggest that …”

  “Thank you, Doctor, you’ve been a great help.”

  “There’s one other thing, Sloan.”

  “Doctor?”

  “The chair. Better men than you have forgotten the chair.”

  Sloan rang off.

  The chair hadn’t been forgotten.

  The superintendent was still at his desk staring out of his window across the Market Square. He was only half-sitting down—being poised the while to rise on the instant anything happened outside Dick’s Dive opposite. It was a physical attitude which had been dubbed throughout the police station as “The Watch Committee Watching.”

  “Well, Sloan?”

  “Leslie Waite is living with a woman called Doreen, sir.”

  “What about it?”

  “We’ve just found out that he married a girl called Freda Cowell during the war.”

  “What happened to her?” enquired the superintendent alertly. “Is she your body?”

  “I don’t know, sir. We’re trying to find out now. I’ve asked the Register Office at Somerset House to do a special search for me as quickly as possible.”

  “No news from Kinnisport Police?”

  “Not yet, sir. They haven’t had a lot of time …”

  Leeyes grunted.

  “This Doreen that he’s living with,” ventured Sloan tentatively, “could be a second wife. Freda Cowell could have divorced him or died ordinarily.”

  “And my name could be George Washington,” snapped the superintendent smartly.

  “Just as likely,” agreed Sloan as gravely as he could.

  Now why had the superintendent chosen George Washington for his simile? According to those lectures on Psychology Today, potted versions of which had reached Sloan each week, the choice of George Washington must mean something.

  “But it isn’t,” said Leeyes unnecessarily.

  “No, sir.” Had it been, wondered Sloan, what was called a Freudian slip? When you unconsciously revealed that which you—consciously—wished to hide? Perhaps the superintendent had a secret yearning to be thought of as a man who could not tell a lie.

  Because, if so …

  “This is the one who was cut out of his father’s will, isn’t it, Sloan?”

  “Yes, sir. Old Ernest Waite left the house—or rather what was left of it—to Harold only.”

  “Have you found out why?”

  “Not yet, sir.” Perhaps Freda Cowell could tell him. If she was alive. If he could find her.

  “There must be a reason. It wasn’t entailed, was it? It’s not a stately home or anything like that.”

  “No, sir. Just an ordinary house.”

  “Primogeniture,” rumbled Leeyes, “doesn’t usually count for much in families like the Waites.”

  “No, sir.” Sloan cleared his throat. “There’s just one thing that’s worrying me about Leslie Waite …”

  “Well?”

  “He doesn’t come into any of those arguments about the rebuilding. Neither does Harold Waite, come to that. He definitely sold the site in 1946—we checked with the Land Registry—and hasn’t figured since.”

  “Until yesterday,” said Leeyes smartly.

  Sloan hadn’t needed reminding. “He only had to tell me, sir … I’d have stopped him coming over if I’d known.”

  “A criminologist,” pronounced Leeyes sagaciously, “is always someone who is wise after the event.”

  Was that meant to be a crumb of comfort? Sloan didn’t know. He pressed on: “I think, sir, we may be nearer a time for the first murder.”

  “Oh?”

  “Towards the end of the winter after the bombing. Say about February or March of 1942. That’s when the loose rubble was cleared. It wouldn’t have been before then.”

  Leeyes said acidly, “Now I suppose all we want is someone who was a first-class rifle shot thirty years ago and bob’s your uncle.”

  “They were all good shots,” pointed out Sloan. “The Waites and Gilbert Hodge were in the Services and Reddley and Garton were in the Home Guard.”

  “And it’s too late to ask them what they were doing on the night in question.” The superintendent’s view of detection was a very simplified one. Sloan had noticed this before.

  “Even if we knew the night …”

  Leeyes drummed his fingers on the desk. “This planning business then that the Waites didn’t come in to …”

  “A proper tangle of delay, restriction, and heaven only knows what, sir, until a couple of months ago when everything suddenly resolved itself all at once.”

  It was like offering a fresh scent to a bloodhound. The superintendent’s head came up with a jerk.

  “Why?”

  “It was the council, sir. About three years ago they said they were going to go ahead with some old slum clearance plans …”

  “About time, too,” growled Leeyes.

  “Well, it seems they’d just about got round to thinking about it properly last May or June when Mark Reddley and Associates slapped in some acceptable plans and got them passed pretty quickly.”

  “So it was a toss-up who developed?”

  “For a little while, anyway. Then Mark Reddley, acting on behalf of Hodge, got the go-ahead and Garton’s men got cracking quite smartly.”

  “Funny, that,” mused Leeyes.

  “Yes, sir.” Sloan admitted that. It was odd that everything should suddenly fall into place after a quarter of a century of delay and debate.

  But the superintendent wasn’t listening any more. An abstracted look had stolen over his face. He was staring out of the window at Dick’s Dive opposite. A van had just pulled up outside it, and a number of remarkably undifferentiated young men and women were tumbling out of the back and going inside the cafe.

  “Dear Sir or Madam, as the case may be,” muttered Leeyes sardonically. “Look at that, Sloan.”

  Sloan obediently looked at the van.

  There was no part of it not painted with flowers.

  “Flower power,” said Leeyes scornfully. “What do you make of that? Look at them! Where shall we be, Sloan, when they’re our only army?”

  “I couldn’t say, sir, I’m sure.” Very probably, he thought, in the same situation as they would be if they weren’t. He made for the door. “I daresay we’ll have to have a new Geneva Convention.” Perhaps the only real hope was that there wouldn’t be an army. What was it that someone was postulating? That these unaggressive youngsters were Nature’s response to the manufacture of wholesale weapons, chain reactions, total destruction nature always bent herself in the direction of the survival of the species …

  Constable Crosby was in Sloan’s office when he got back.

  With more tea.

  And some news from Somerset House.

  In the circumstances, r
ead the message sheet, they had made a priority job of Inspector Sloan’s request for information.

  “Nice of them,” said Sloan. With murder cases time was usually of the essence and, even if it wasn’t, the press hounds baying on the police heels always made it seem as if it was.

  “Item,” said Crosby, reading aloud, “there is no record in the General Register Office of any death being registered in the name of any Freda Waite nee Cowell from natural or any other causes.”

  Sloan got out his notebook.

  “Item,” said Crosby, still holding the paper, “there is no record of any marriage having taken place between Leslie Waite and a woman called Doreen …”

  “Ah …” Sloan drank his tea and considered this.

  “Item,” continued Crosby, “there was a son born to the aforementioned Leslie and Freda Waite …”

  “The devil there was!” Perhaps they were getting somewhere after all.

  “Name of Brian Ernest.”

  “That didn’t make any difference,” said Sloan elliptically.

  “Er—what didn’t, sir?”

  “Calling him after his grandfather. Everything still went to brother Harold.” Sloan put down his cup. “Get out an all stations message about Freda and Brian Waite. Anyone knowing their whereabouts …”

  “Will do …”

  “If they don’t find Freda Waite,” Sloan said, thinking ahead, “it still doesn’t account for the fact that she wasn’t recorded anywhere as missing.”

  “No, sir,” Crosby nodded. “Then it’ll be like Mrs. Sloan said at breakfast this morning, won’t it?”

  “What do you mean?” growled Sloan. He wasn’t having his wife’s name bandied about at the police station by young detective constables.

  “Everyone must have thought she was somewhere else. Like Mrs. Sloan said,” he went on awkwardly, “they didn’t think she was missing because they thought they knew where she was. Only …” his voice trailed off lamely, “she wasn’t.”

  Take this advice when buying a bed: lie on it

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “I just don’t understand,” said a bewildered Miss Tyrell. “Are you trying to tell me that Dr. Tarde shot that girl?”

  “No, miss. He didn’t shoot her. Or kill Harold Waite either, come to that.” Sloan had found Miss Tyrell still at Field House, still in her official-looking white coat. He had sent Crosby out into the back streets of Berebury to see what he could find out about a woman called Freda Waite, née Cowell. Dr. William Latimer had gone out again on his afternoon round.

  “Well, then, what …”

  “Miss, if there were any young lady hereabouts who was having a baby, who would be most likely to know about it?”

  She smiled a little. “I think I would, Inspector.”

  “And who else?”

  “The doctor, of course, but he’s new still. It’ll take a little time before …”

  “Naturally. But before. When the old doctor was alive?”

  “Ah, that was different.” Her brow cleared. “He’d have known …”

  “Yes, miss. I think he would. It’s something I should have thought about before.”

  Her head came up sharply. “He wouldn’t have killed that girl.”

  “No.”

  “He was a doctor, Inspector. He was dedicated to saving life, not wasting it.”

  “Yes, miss, of course.” Sloan didn’t argue: though a first-class medical training hadn’t stopped those well-remembered doctors Harley Crippen, Buck Ruxton, William Palmer—Palmer, the poisoner—Lamson, Cream, Smethurst, and Petiot from doing murder in their day. It would seem the medical training had, if anything, helped. “But would he have known about the baby?”

  Miss Tyrell adjusted her glasses and favored him with a thoroughly intelligent stare. “I see what you’re getting at, Inspector.”

  He thought she would. Why did people decry sensible women so? They were certainly a pleasure for a police officer to deal with.

  “What,” said Miss Tyrell slowly, picking her words with obvious care, “you are inferring, I take it, is that if Dr. Tarde had known about the pregnancy then, he might have been able—had he been alive now—to have put a name to that unfortunate girl whom they found opposite?”

  “Just so, miss.” He was in no doubt about in which sense Miss Tyrell was using the word “unfortunate.”

  In the same sense as his mother would have used it.

  “Then,” she said flatly, “it’s lucky for someone that he’s not.”

  “Very lucky,” agreed Sloan at once.

  Her head came up with a jerk at that. “I never believed myself that it was suicide.”

  “I am beginning to feel,” said Sloan cautiously, “that I could make out a case for its not having been. There was no note, for instance.”

  There was in this case, he had already noted, a distinct absence of the written word altogether. It would seem that there was someone abroad too clever to play about with forgery.

  “You mean,” said Miss Tyrell, “if it wasn’t suicide it was someone actually wanting him out of the way?”

  “It’s a possibility that we’re bound to consider.”

  “That would mean, Inspector”—Miss Tyrell took out a spotless white handkerchief and began to polish the lens of her glasses—“that Dr. Tarde would have known who she was.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that very few other people did.”

  “You’re very quick.”

  She acknowledged this with a faint bow of her head.

  “One of them being Harold Waite?”

  “I’m very much afraid so.”

  Miss Tyrell put away her handkerchief and replaced her glasses firmly on the center of her nose. “It may be a strange thing to say, Inspector, but it would be a great comfort to me to know that it wasn’t suicide.”

  “Yes, miss, I can understand that. It was in June, wasn’t it?” It had been about then, too, that the plans for the redevelopment of the Lamb Lane site, which had been on the files for upwards of twenty-five years, had suddenly taken a great leap forward.

  “That’s right.” She sighed. “The house seemed full of death then. Mrs. Cardington—she was the doctor’s old housekeeper—she had only just died.”

  “What about relatives, miss?” The old doctor’s connection with the case was still obscure but it was there. He was beginning to be sure about that. Sloan wanted to know all he could now about Dr. Tarde. “His wife died years ago, I believe.”

  She nodded matter-of-factly. “Before the war, even. There was no family—just a second cousin of his and a niece on his wife’s side—and she lost touch during the war …” Her voice trailed away as she caught sight of the expression on Sloan’s face.

  “Do you mind saying that again, miss, please …”

  “She lost touch with the doctor during the war,” faltered Miss Tyrell. “His wife’s sister’s girl. Margot. She left here one night and didn’t come back. The doctor never heard from her again.”

  “Didn’t he?” and Sloan quietly. “Didn’t he indeed?”

  “For my money,” Sloan informed Crosby, “she’s Margot Elinor Poulton, Dr. Tarde’s wife’s niece.”

  “She’s not Freda Waite, anyway, sir,” returned Crosby briskly, slapping his notebook down on Sloan’s desk. “I’ve just been talking to her. She’s living in Park Street calling herself a widow. Under the name of Cowell.”

  “Margot Poulton was last seen alive,” said Sloan meaningly, “early in April 1942.” Miss Tyrell hadn’t been sure about the date, hadn’t remembered the girl particularly well. Margot Poulton had only been in the habit of visiting her uncle at Field House. She didn’t live there. Miss Tyrell hadn’t seen her at all on her last visit of all to Dr. Tarde. “You can guess why that was, Crosby, can’t you?”

  “Yes, sir. Didn’t want Miss Tyrell to know about the baby.”

  “I’ll bet that’s why she came back to Berebury, though,” said Sloan.

  “To have
a word with the boyfriend,” suggested Crosby brightly, “and to ask him what he was going to do about it.”

  “I expect,” said Sloan with heavy irony, “That she was all for a shotgun marriage.”

  “And someone didn’t like the idea of marrying her?”

  “Or by then they liked the idea of marrying someone else better.” Sloan hesitated. “She doesn’t seem to have been everyone’s cup of tea.”

  It had been marvelous the way in which the genteel Miss Tyrell had conveyed this information to him. A couple of nice nuances and a few unspoken sentences had told Sloan that on the whole the doctor must have been quite relieved when she had apparently taken herself off and not come back.

  “So,” said Crosby intelligently, “whoever killed her guessed Uncle Henry wasn’t going to be too keen on finding her. Especially as he thinks she’ll have an illegitimate baby in tow.”

  “She doesn’t sound as if she would have added to his professional standing locally,” agreed Sloan. “I don’t think he would have looked too hard for her.”

  “It was like Mrs. Sloan said then,” persisted Crosby with unusual doggedness. “Everyone thought she was somewhere else.”

  “London,” said Sloan. “That’s where she’d come from. That’s where they thought she’d gone to. They certainly didn’t think for one moment that she was only across the road.”

  “No.”

  “That doesn’t mean to say, of course,” said Sloan, developing his argument as he went along, “that if a pregnant young woman of the right age and the right vintage had happened to have been disinterred there that they wouldn’t have put two and two together and made four.”

  “That’s what Harold Waite did, I suppose, sir.”

  “Harold Waite knew her, too. Miss Tyrell said she had an idea he was something of an old flame.”

  “Neat to bury her under his house then,” said Crosby.

  “Very. If she’s found he’s the first person who is going to be asked about her.”

  “And the old doctor would have put two and two together like you said, sir.”

  “Bound to. If he’d been alive to do it.” Sloan coughed. “There was someone else who would have done, too. If she’d been alive.”

  Crosby’s head came up enquiringly.

  “A Mrs. Cardington. The old doctor’s housekeeper. She died of a heart attack in May.”