Learning Curve

by Catherine Aird

  ‘Which he did,’ said Sloan. ‘On the excuse that the light in his headlamp had gone out.’

  ‘If you ask me,’ said the explosives expert after he had emerged from the caves, shaking himself like a shaggy dog, ‘the batteries in his headlamp would have done the job nicely. But as for retiring I should imagine that might have been a bit more difficult down there.’

  ‘Not really,’ said Sloan. ‘He shouted to the man behind him, a fellow caver called Derek Tridgell, to stay where he was until he got back to him for some new batteries. I daresay he got a move on.’

  ‘I should hope so,’ said the explosives man. ‘On the other hand he knew exactly how far to crawl away from the site before he untied the ends of the leads and touched the battery terminals with them.’

  ‘He must have taped the flex out of the way somewhere so it wasn’t seen,’ concluded Sloan. The expert didn’t have Superintendent Leeyes at his back, ready to pounce on any loose ends. ‘He would have had to have done, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘He might have cut a groove out for them in the roof while he was about it,’ said the expert. ‘No, much better than that – he could easily have scraped a little channel for it in the ground and covered it over with dirt. No one would have noticed anything in those conditions, not with Erebus on his side, which you could say he was down there.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Sloan bluntly. He’d never been more aware of being alone than when he was in the dark water of the cave.

  ‘The God of Darkness.’

  ‘Ah, I get you.’ Sloan was the first to admit that darkness was only a help to thieves and other ill-doers. Not to the constabulary.

  ‘Son of Chaos,’ said the expert.

  ‘You can say that again,’ nodded Sloan. Chaos had reigned in the water inside the cave all right. While he had been struggling with Simon Thornycroft, Paul Tridgell had tried diving under the water to grasp the man’s legs. Crosby had joined in the melee, clinging onto the bottom of the ladder with one hand and stretching out with the other to grab Thornycroft’s arm until it was safely snapped into the handcuffs. Kate Booth had shone the light on them all and then guided reinforcements to the spot.

  ‘Don’t overdo the drama, Sloan,’ said the superintendent afterwards from the comfort of his own office. ‘The press might like it but the force doesn’t.’

  ‘No, sir. Of course not, sir.’ Sloan decided against telling him that the real drama had come when he had eventually got back to his own home, Detective Constable Crosby in tow. He had been dry and reclothed by then but with his other trousers soaking wet still. His wife, Margaret, had had to be told the whole story by degrees before she could be reconciled to his suit never being likely to be the same ever again and his shoes lost for ever in a murky pool of water in an underground cave.

  ‘You could have drowned,’ she said accusingly.

  ‘I can swim.’

  ‘Just as well, wasn’t it?’ she said, unappeased.

  ‘I wouldn’t have gone into the water if I could help it.’

  She gave him a very considered look. ‘Really?’

  ‘Of course,’ he mumbled.

  She raised her eyebrows and asked, ‘So what would you have done then if you couldn’t? Watch the man kill Paul Tridgell?’

  ‘Well …’ he temporised, aware that whatever he said would be wrong.

  ‘I don’t think so, Christopher,’ she said.

  Neither did Sloan but he was old enough and experienced enough not to dwell too long on the ‘what might have happened’ side of life.

  Or to argue with a wife struggling with the conflicting emotions of anger and relief.

  Margaret Sloan next trained her guns on a still slightly damp Crosby. ‘And what about you, Bill? Can you swim?’

  ‘No, Mrs Sloan.’ He shook his head, his hair nowhere near dry after a shower. ‘But I didn’t have to. You see all I had to do was to hang onto the bottom of the ladder and grab the accused while the inspector and Paul Tridgell dragged him over.’ Referring to a man as ‘the accused’ stripped him of status quicker than anything else that Crosby knew.

  ‘Well, don’t do it again either of you,’ she said, relaxing at last.

  ‘Oh, I shan’t,’ said Crosby earnestly. He looked downcast then and said, ‘I don’t suppose I shall be allowed to ever again, anyway.’

  ‘Why not?’ she asked.

  ‘Control had told me I wasn’t to go down into the cave until they’d made sure it was safe to do so and their backup arrived.’

  ‘Oh, they did, did they?’ she said dryly.

  ‘But when the computer said the other car belonged to Simon Thornycroft I thought I’d better get down there, pretty pronto. I’ll probably,’ he forecast gloomily, ‘get a real rocket for disobeying orders when I get to the station in the morning.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  ‘I’ve always known Dad was uneasy about something, Inspector,’ said Paul Tridgell. He was back in his own home, safe and sound now, although his mother had taken a lot of convincing of the fact. He had an even bigger bandage on his right wrist today and hadn’t hesitated to swallow some painkillers. ‘But I didn’t work out exactly what – until yesterday, that is.’

  ‘After Thursday night’s car accident?’ hazarded Sloan.

  ‘It was no accident,’ said Tridgell feelingly. ‘Once I’d got that into my head I started thinking.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I’d already worked out that it had to be either Jonathon Sharp or Simon Thornycroft.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan didn’t see any reason to tell him that he, too, had got as far as realising that days ago. What had let Jonathan Sharp off the hook as far as Sloan was concerned had been a phone call to health and safety after he had heard from Crosby about their second visit to Luston Chemicals.

  It appeared that another employee had nearly ended up in another of their vats. ‘A design fault in the protective mechanism,’ one of their examiners had reported to him. ‘It wasn’t so obvious the first time but we should have spotted it all the same. It was still death by misadventure though,’ he had added as if the right inquest verdict was what had mattered.

  Business wars had mattered at Luston, too, but it wasn’t them that had led to murder. Consciously leaving two firms to fight their own battles, Sloan had turned his mind in another direction.

  What had first led him to Thornycroft was something quite different: the tiniest of discrepancies in what had been said and what had not been said. Kate Booth had spoken of a great bang in the cave, Simon Thornycroft of a whoosh: Kate of the distinctive smell of marzipan after the explosion, something Thornycroft had failed to mention, even though their police expert had said it would be there and noticeable.

  ‘And then?’ he asked Tridgell now.

  ‘I realised that whoever had been at the wheel of that car outside the Lamb and Flag was trying to prevent me – what is it you lot call it? – “pursuing enquiries”.’

  ‘We’d reached that conclusion, too, sir,’ said Sloan gravely. He hadn’t thought that the day would come so soon when he would feel happy about calling young Paul Tridgell ‘Sir’ but boy had turned into adult as swiftly as any maturing chrysalis. He decided against arguing about Tridgell’s referring to the police as ‘you lot’. They had, after all, been called worse.

  ‘Then it dawned on me that when Dad kept on saying “Dammit, dammit” he wasn’t swearing. He was telling them to try to dam the water in the cave while they were trying to get to Edmund Leaton.’

  ‘Just so,’ said Sloan, who hadn’t forgotten any of Derek Tridgell’s last words. It was ‘the wrong remainderman’ who had given him the most cause for thought. It had only been when Kate Booth had said that as a complete beginner at the time she was the wrong caver to be bringing up the rear of their little party that day – it was usually the most experienced one who went last – that he had worked it out. It should have been Simon Thornycroft there but Thornycroft needed to be just behind Edmund Leaton and have Derek Tridg
ell immediately behind him to come back to ostensibly for spare batteries.

  ‘So I decided to take action,’ said Paul Tridgell.

  ‘Don’t do it again,’ said Sloan automatically.

  ‘But what I couldn’t understand was why Dad let things rest like he did.’

  ‘He might have felt he was in danger if he had taken any action,’ suggested Sloan.

  ‘He wasn’t that sort of man,’ said Paul, stoutly defending his father for the first time in his life. ‘He wasn’t a coward.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan said, ‘He might have felt that as Amelia and Lucy Leaton were being taken care of, that the least said the better in the circumstances.’

  ‘Until he couldn’t not say it any longer.’ Derek Tridgell’s son put it awkwardly but Sloan knew what he meant.

  ‘I am sure he thought he was acting for the best,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan.

  ‘And who are we to say he wasn’t?’ Paul challenged him.

  As far as Sloan was concerned, answer came there none.

  ‘I hear you got your man, Seedy.’ Inspector Harpe pushed a mug of tea companionably across the table in Sloan’s direction. The two of them were sitting together in the canteen at the police station at the end of the week.

  ‘I’ve got him all right,’ said Sloan warmly. ‘Whether the Crown Prosecution Service’ll get him, too, as you know, Harry, is in the lap of the gods.’ Since he had encountered Erebus, God of Darkness, son of Chaos, his view of the powerfulness of the gods had changed.

  ‘Too right.’ The traffic inspector’s muted response exuded sympathy with this reservation. ‘Good work, though, Seedy. I wish I could say the same. I don’t think that we’re ever going to nail whoever was driving in that fatal at Christmas.’

  Sloan took a sip of his tea. ‘I’ve had a few thoughts about that, Harry.’

  Inspector Harpe sat up. ‘Really?’

  ‘Nothing that you could prove, though.’

  ‘That happens. Go on.’

  ‘Something Crosby noticed put me on to it.’

  ‘Crosby? You’re joking.’

  ‘No, Harry. Seriously. He sussed out that the girl has had a properly adapted car in her garage for ages, courtesy of her mother’s insurance company.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘And that she only ever uses it, though, to go to her hospital appointments.’

  ‘Cold feet about getting back to driving?’

  In the circumstances that didn’t seem a good metaphor. ‘Only literally, I suppose,’ Sloan said. Actually he had no idea whether the feet of a woman paralysed from the waist down were cold or not.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Not only is she not using the car but she won’t go out of the house at all, except as I say to the hospital.’

  Inspector Harpe’s eyebrows rose in a prodigious frown. ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Doesn’t it strike you as odd, Harry, too? She’s got a brand-new car specially adapted for her sitting in the garage but she won’t go out socially at all.’

  Harpe sniffed. ‘I’m not all that struck on the social side of things myself, Seedy. The wife likes it, though, more’s the pity.’

  ‘You’re not a young woman, Harry. Not even a half-paralysed one.’

  ‘Too right, I’m not,’ growled the traffic inspector, who had found out the hard way that nowadays some young women drivers were as hazardous, not to say as aggressive, as some young men behind the wheel.

  ‘The village hall in Larking has just had a major refit,’ remarked Sloan with apparent inconsequence. ‘I started to put two and two together after Crosby told me about Elizabeth Shelford’s self-immurement …well, staying within the house walls, anyway.’

  ‘I thought they only went in for walling up naughty nuns.’

  ‘This is immolation – I think that’s the right word – in her own home, not bricked up behind a wall and not in history.’

  ‘All right, all right.’ Harpe took a swig of tea. ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘When Crosby asked her what she did all the while she was indoors she told him that she picked oakum.’

  ‘They don’t do that in prisons any more.’

  ‘Not in prisons, no. Not now. But after Crosby also told me the girl wouldn’t go out at all unless she had to, it occurred to me that she might be acting out a theoretical sentence for causing death while under the influence.’

  ‘I don’t get it, Seedy.’

  ‘Neither did I, Harry, until I had a word with the treasurer of the village hall out there.’

  ‘I’m still not with you.’

  ‘He admitted that they’d had a sizeable strictly anonymous donation just after Christmas which got them going on the restoration work. Very pleased, he was.’

  ‘Lucky old them.’

  ‘Which sum, funnily enough, was exactly the same amount as the likely fine that a convicted driver would have got in a case of causing death while driving under the influence.’

  ‘I begin to get your drift.’ The traffic man nodded his head slowly. ‘It adds up, I suppose.’

  ‘Big fine, long prison sentence, and driving ban,’ said Sloan checking off one finger after the other. ‘She’s behaving as if she’s had them all.’

  ‘You could be right.’ Inspector Harpe drained his mug. Like all policemen and prison officers, let alone psychiatrists and the clergy, he knew quite a lot about atonement and redemption. And remorse. Especially remorse. ‘I daresay the others in the car all know, too.’

  ‘They probably think she’s suffered enough,’ said Sloan, getting to his feet. ‘More tea, Harry?’

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  About the Author

  CATHERINE AIRD is the author of more than twenty crime novels and story collections, most of which feature Detective Inspector Sloan. She holds an honorary MA from the University of Kent and was made an MBE. Apart from writing the successful Chronicles of Calleshire, she has also written and edited a series of village histories. She lives in Kent.

  By Catherine Aird

  Hole in One

  Losing Ground

  Past Tense

  Dead Heading

  Last Writes

  Learning Curve

  Copyright

  Allison & Busby Limited

  12 Fitzroy Mews

  London W1T 6DW

  allisonandbusby.com

  First published in 2016.

  This ebook edition first published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2016.

  Copyright © 2016 by CATHERINE AIRD

  The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978–0–7490–2024–8

 

 

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