Little Knell

by Catherine Aird

  ‘However,’ announced Marcus Fixby-Smith firmly, ‘for the purposes of removing this artefact from here to the Greatorex Museum I am deeming it to contain the remains of a human being rightly or wrongly given the name of Rodoheptah, since this is what the colonel called it.’

  ‘Quite so,’ murmured Simon Puckle.

  ‘What does that mean exactly?’ asked Sid, wiping his hands on his trousers, the better to take hold of the wooden case.

  ‘That we carry it very carefully,’ said Fixby-Smith. He was a man to whom the use of the Royal we came easily.

  ‘Like we knew there was someone in there?’ asked Wayne. He looked distinctly dubious.

  ‘Just like that,’ said Fixby-Smith. ‘A someone moreover who might come to harm if he were tipped up.’

  ‘Or even tilted,’ growled Sid Wetherspoon, who had a good idea of what the firm’s insurers would have to say about any claim arising for damages to the skeleton of a long-dead Egyptian.

  ‘How do you know it’s a he?’ asked Wayne. He had already sensed that his employment with the removal firm wasn’t going to last any longer than it had done with all the other jobs he had tried. ‘Could have been a woman, couldn’t it?’

  ‘Not with that name ending,’ replied Fixby-Smith absently.

  ‘Use your eyes, lad.’ Sid pointed to a phallic design still just discernible on the mummy case.

  ‘What? Oh, I see…’ At the drop of a hat Wayne’s face assumed a look of unbelievable innocence. ‘Blue for a boy…’

  ‘That’s enough of that, Goddard,’ snapped Sid Wetherspoon. ‘Here, take your end and get moving.’

  Wayne Goddard grinned cheekily as he bent down. ‘What you might call dead weight, eh?’

  Wetherspoon, ignoring this, turned to Simon Puckle and Marcus Fixby-Smith and said with dignity, ‘I can assure you, gentlemen, that moving the mummy will be no problem at all.’

  Moving the mummy was a problem somewhere else, though.

  The police station at Berebury.

  But later.

  Chapter Two

  Bumped

  ‘Detective Inspector Sloan?’ enquired the man’s voice at the other end of the telephone. ‘Jenkins here. Customs and Excise, Kinnisport.’

  ‘Good morning,’ said Sloan warily. The police force were not the only regulatory body in the kingdom deeply concerned with the pursuit of wrongdoers. Customs and Excise ranked high among the others.

  And knew it.

  ‘Just a courtesy call…’

  ‘Ah…’ Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan was head of the tiny Criminal Investigation Department of F Division of the Calleshire Constabulary, and such troubles as there were in the market town of Berebury and its rural environs usually landed on his desk; but not those offshore. They were the province of the water guard.

  The exciseman gave a little laugh. ‘From one brother-in-law to another, you might say.’

  ‘Quite,’ responded Sloan, acknowledging the witticism. The poet Robert Burns had been an exciseman; perhaps Jenkins too saw himself as having a way with words.

  ‘Or to fellow labourers in the vineyard.’

  Actually, this was generous of Jenkins since Customs and Excise enjoyed powers of search – let alone other things – envied by both the police and the Inland Revenue.

  ‘About a man called Boller at Edsway. Horace Boller,’ said Jenkins. ‘Do you people know him?’

  ‘The boatman? Oh, yes, we know Boller all right.’ The Boller family had been twisting the people of Edsway since time immemorial. ‘An old rogue if ever there was one; always in a very small way, though. Never does anything you can actually pin on him.’

  ‘That’s the man,’ said Jenkins at once.

  ‘What’s he done now?’ If the excise people had caught out Horace Boller in malfeasance then they were better men than the entire Calleshire Constabulary who had signally failed to catch out Boller performing any action that constituted a chargeable offence. And not for want of trying, either.

  ‘We’re not sure that he’s done anything,’ said the man from Customs and Excise frankly. ‘Well, that is to say nothing that we can nail him for.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I don’t know what it was like with you inland, Inspector, but it was pretty foggy out at sea this morning…’

  ‘A little misty here, that’s all,’ said Sloan, waiting.

  ‘Boller was attending to his lobster pots off the headland early today when he fished something up in one of them.’

  ‘Something interesting swam into it while he wasn’t looking, then?’ Sloan tried to hurry the man along. Customs and Excise were very much the longest-established service, and now and then inclined to rub it in.

  ‘Something valuable, Inspector,’ said Jenkins. ‘Something very valuable indeed. And not a lobster.’

  ‘Drugs?’ said Sloan, beginning to get irritated with the other man’s circumlocution.

  ‘Four kilos of just that,’ said Jenkins with satisfaction. ‘It’s gone for analysis, of course, but we’re sure enough it’s heroin.’

  ‘I see,’ said Sloan. He wasn’t surprised by the information. They’d worked out long ago that the drugs that percolated out all over the county of Calleshire were coming in by sea. ‘And Boller handed it in just like that?’ Now that was something that did surprise him.

  ‘Boller told us that he didn’t know what it was or how it came to be in one of his lobster pots.’

  ‘And did he know?’

  ‘Ah, Inspector, that’s a horse of a very different colour. You see, there just happened to be one of our own vessels about at the time, and it hove in view out of the fog just as Boller was hauling his catch in. He hadn’t known we were lying off the headland and, because of the poor visibility, we hadn’t realized how near he was to us.’

  ‘And so Boller turned Queen’s Evidence pretty quickly, just to be on the safe side?’ He’d never known any man so good at minding his own back as Horace Boller.

  Jenkins laughed again. ‘I reckon he didn’t have much choice about doing his Little Jack Horner act because he saw us see him at it.’

  ‘“What a good boy am I”,’ quoted Sloan absently, thinking hard.

  ‘He pulled out a plum, all right,’ said Jenkins. ‘The street value of this little lot doesn’t bear thinking about; although how the dealers use the money they make from the stuff without it showing beats me.’

  ‘Us, too. All the businesses we know here are doing well but not so well as we’d want to know the reason why.’

  ‘Somebody’s getting the money,’ said the Customs and Excise man ineluctably.

  ‘Undoubtedly, but you tell me who and we’ll run them in. No problem.’

  ‘And getting rid of the takings pretty quickly too – well before we catch ’em with it, anyway.’

  ‘And, as far as we know,’ persisted Sloan, undeflected, ‘all the local solicitors and accountants are as upright as pianos.’

  ‘And the insurance people?’

  ‘How can anyone tell?’

  ‘It must be big money. Really big.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ the policeman said.

  Detective Inspector Sloan had decided years ago that all policemen had to live strictly compartmentalized lives. At his own breakfast table only this morning there had been a lengthy debate – well, discussion, anyway – on whether or not the Sloan household’s budget would run to the purchase of a special collection of patio standard roses. His wife, Margaret, had been markedly unsympathetic.

  It wasn’t so much a matter of guns before butter, she had remarked, as butter before roses. Hanging heavily over the talk had been the unresolved matter of a new floor covering to replace the worn one in the Sloan kitchen.

  And now here he was at work, having taken a quantum leap in relative values, talking not only about drugs worth a king’s ransom on the open market but the manifold difficulties of stashing the proceeds away. He said more to himself than to the customs man, ‘It’s a funny old world, all
right.’

  ‘And Boller was innocence personified when we interviewed him. Couldn’t have been more virtuous.’

  ‘Naturally,’ murmured Sloan. ‘It’s not as if he could very well be anything else if he was caught in the act.’

  ‘Does a good job, does our revenue cutter,’ said Jenkins with satisfaction. ‘Smugglers don’t like it at all.’

  ‘And Boller?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Inspector. We kept a bit of an eye on him afterwards. He parked the lobsters he had caught…’

  ‘The real ones?’

  ‘The decapod crustaceans themselves,’ Jenkins assured him solemnly. ‘He put them in a tank of water and then he took a basket of bits of fish over to that animal rescue place behind Edsway. You know where I mean – the one those two women run.’

  ‘Alison and Jennifer Kirk.’ What with their fundraising and their good works all Calleshire knew about the animal sanctuary at Edsway. The two sisters took in the stray dogs and cats that were brought into the police station, too.

  ‘The spare fish is for the cats there. One of my men says Boller always does that whenever he’s got anything unsaleable in his catch.’

  ‘And there was I,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan sourly, ‘thinking that Horace Boller was the exception that proves the rule about there being some good in every man.’

  But the Customs and Excise officer was following quite a different train of thought.

  ‘Our picking up this consignment will make a big hole in some dealer’s distribution system,’ he forecast. ‘I don’t know how many weeks’ supply it constituted for your patch, Inspector Sloan, but I dare say you’re going to feel the shortage over at Berebury quite soon. That can be quite tricky.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sloan, bleakly.

  ‘Anyway,’ Jenkins finished breezily before he rang off, ‘now we’ve let you know all about it.’

  The civilities had been duly observed.

  * * *

  It wasn’t the diplomatic niceties of inter-regulatory authority communication which were troubling Superintendent Leeyes. It was a matter of protocol. He barely listened to Sloan’s report about Horace Boller before unburdening himself about another, more pressing, problem.

  ‘It’s the coroner,’ Leeyes rasped.

  ‘The coroner, sir?’ said Sloan.

  ‘Making work.’

  ‘Really, sir?’ Sloan didn’t know what to think about this. The trouble was that the superintendent – an absolutist if ever there was one – only ever saw difficulties from his own point of view, which made even a well-educated guess impossible.

  ‘The man can’t have enough to do,’ grumbled Leeyes. ‘That’s his trouble.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan contented himself with leaning forward attentively. There was absolutely nothing in his expression to indicate that he was taking this last assertion with the proverbial pinch of salt. He did not himself suppose for one moment that Her Majesty’s Coroner for East Calleshire, Mr Granville Locombe-Stableford, had nothing better to do than upset the police superintendent, whatever that worthy might think. He did know, though, that the coroner and Superintendent Leeyes were sparring partners of old. And he knew, too, that in the way of ancient enemies, the two of them picked a quarrel whenever they could find a bone even half worth the contention.

  All Sloan said aloud though was, ‘I’m not aware, sir, of there having been any reportable deaths in the division today…’

  ‘There haven’t,’ snapped Leeyes.

  ‘But…’

  ‘Don’t you understand, Sloan? That’s just what I’m telling you. The man hasn’t got better things to do and all this does is prove it.’

  ‘This?’ Sloan picked on the word, feeling as if he was grasping at a straw in the verbal – and proverbial – wind. ‘What…’

  But Leeyes had already taken off at a tangent. ‘Poking his nose into matters that have nothing whatsoever to do with him; that’s what he’s doing.’

  ‘You mean, sir,’ advanced Sloan cautiously, trying again, ‘that there’s been a fatality in East Calleshire but that it’s outside Mr Locombe-Stableford’s jurisdiction?’ This at least, decided Sloan, would make sense. A deep preoccupation with the territorial imperative was one of the many characteristics which the superintendent and the coroner had in common.

  ‘Well, no,’ hedged Leeyes. ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Or outside ours?’ suggested Sloan even more cautiously. The superintendent knew to an inch where his own writ ran and defended all his boundaries with a vigour that some of his staff thought might well have been better devoted to more important police matters.

  ‘No,’ admitted Leeyes grudgingly. ‘This body’s on our patch all right. No doubt about that.’

  ‘And on the coroner’s, too?’ asked Sloan, puzzled. He ran his mind’s eye down the list that reposed on his desk, new every morning, of missing persons in Calleshire. As he remembered it, the names comprised those of a confused elderly gentleman who had gone absent from an old people’s home in Kinnisport – and without his false teeth, too, which his carers considered significant; a young woman who hadn’t been seen since a tiff with her boyfriend – the boyfriend had been interviewed and would be interviewed again if she didn’t turn up soon; and a now-not-so-young woman who hadn’t been observed by the constabulary on her usual beat on the streets of Luston for the last six nights.

  ‘That’s the trouble,’ said Leeyes.

  ‘I don’t quite follow, sir.’

  ‘The coroner says,’ the superintendent mimicked the carefully modulated tones of that august official, ‘that acting on information received…’

  ‘What!’ Sloan exclaimed. ‘Sorry, sir, but…’

  ‘I thought you wouldn’t like that, Sloan,’ observed the superintendent with a certain melancholy satisfaction.

  He didn’t. That phrase, ‘acting on information received’, was one of the police’s best lines; not usually one of the coroner’s.

  ‘Mr Locombe-Stableford says,’ went on the superintendent, ‘he’s been informed that a body has been moved within his jurisdiction in East Calleshire, but without his knowledge or consent.’

  ‘And the name of the deceased?’ asked Detective Inspector Sloan, getting out his notebook. As far as he was concerned, any of the three souls on this morning’s list of local missing could have turned up anywhere in Calleshire as dead bodies rather than as living persons.

  Or none of them.

  ‘Nobody knows the name for certain,’ said the superintendent enigmatically.

  ‘An unidentified body…’ began Sloan.

  ‘But I am told,’ continued Leeyes, ‘that ever since anyone can remember he has been known as Rodoheptah.’

  ‘Would you happen to know how that was spelt, sir?’ Sloan metaphorically licked the tip of his pencil and waited.

  ‘No,’ said Leeyes.

  ‘Is it known, then, where the deceased was removed from, sir?’

  Leeyes squinted down at a piece of paper on his desk. ‘Whimbrel House, Edgewood Hill, Staple St James.’

  ‘Colonel Caversham’s?’ Sloan looked up, surprised. ‘But it’s weeks and weeks since he died. Quite a famous old boy in his time…’

  ‘Not as long ago as this body,’ said Leeyes grimly. ‘It’s an Egyptian mummy.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘But our Mr Granville Locombe-Stableford insists that as far as he is concerned a mummy is nevertheless still a body.’

  ‘Within the meaning of the Act, I suppose,’ supplemented Detective Inspector Sloan, not sure exactly where this got them. He, himself, was still trying to concentrate all his working hours on the sudden and worrying upsurge in drug dealing in rural Calleshire. Knowing that the stuff was coming in by sea hadn’t really got them much further.

  ‘Precisely,’ agreed Leeyes eagerly. ‘That is until the remains have been duly certified by a registered medical practitioner as being only of archaeological interest.’ Leeyes completed the coroner’s grounds for jurisdic
tion in a manner that left no room for doubt about his opinion of them.

  With an effort, Sloan wrenched his mind off the drug scene. ‘So…’

  ‘So, Sloan, as far as the coroner is concerned, technically, an offence was committed when the body was moved from where it last was.’

  ‘I see.’ Sloan cast about in the back of his mind for the exact nature of this offence. If anyone was going to be charged with it, he, Sloan, would first have to find out under which particular ancient statute that would be; and that would certainly have to be done before he even got as far as cautioning anyone. He had an uneasy feeling that the office of coroner went back to William the Conqueror, at least. ‘Do we know who committed this alleged offence, sir?’

  ‘Wetherspoon and Wetherspoon.’

  ‘The removal people?’

  ‘Them,’ said Leeyes. ‘Or, more precisely, Sidney Wetherspoon himself and one Wayne Goddard.’

  ‘Wayne Goddard?’ Sloan frowned. ‘That name rings a bell. Sid Wetherspoon, I’ve known since I was a lad.’ Detective Inspector Christopher Dennis Sloan was Calleshire born and bred and thus knew his patch better than most. ‘I wouldn’t have thought he’d do the wrong thing. Not Sid.’

  The superintendent picked up the message sheet and continued, quoting from the coroner’s statement, ‘… “in that they did move or cause to be moved a body without either first obtaining my written permission or acting on the duly authorized instructions of my officer”.’

  ‘So,’ concluded Detective Inspector Sloan, ‘he’s not blaming PC Stuart, then?’ Police Constable Douglas Stuart had acted as the coroner’s officer, his right-hand man, at Berebury for years and years.

  ‘Not likely,’ snorted Leeyes. ‘Well, he wouldn’t, would he, seeing he needs him like he does? Locombe-Stableford hasn’t done a hand’s turn himself since Nelson lost his eye.’

  ‘Doug Stuart does save him a lot of work,’ observed Sloan moderately.

  ‘Difficult man to pin anything on, is Stuart,’ said Leeyes, sounding aggrieved. As far as the superintendent was concerned this was the rub.