Little Knell

by Catherine Aird

  ‘That wasn’t a row,’ he said with scorn. ‘That was a normal domestic talk-through.’

  ‘Domestic?’ The word had overtones at the police station.

  ‘We’ve been together for quite a time,’ Thornhill said with seeming irrelevance.

  ‘Then what?’ asked Crosby.

  ‘She just didn’t come back here after that.’ He leaned forward and sank his head between his hands.

  ‘And?’ Crosby discounted the gesture. The man could be a trained tragedian.

  ‘When it got very late I rang the Ornum Arms. Johnny Hedger – that’s the landlord – said she wasn’t there but he couldn’t remember when she’d left.’ He pulled his lips up in the travesty of a smile. ‘I expect that’s what all landlords always say to women who telephone asking for their men.’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Well, I can assure you that they do it when men ring up asking for their women now, too.’

  ‘Very possibly, sir.’

  ‘And then I rang the hospital in case she’d had an accident.’

  Crosby glanced down at the report. ‘We checked that, too. Routine.’

  Colin Thornhill pulled himself up and, giving Crosby a very direct look, said, ‘What did you come here for if you’ve got it all written down as you obviously have?’

  Crosby shuffled his feet, his eyes cast obliquely. ‘The name of her dentist, please.’

  The great importance of body language and its correct interpretation had been one of the features of the detective constable’s training. He had also been taught those elements of it which can be counterfeited. Crosby was well aware, too, that the man to whom he was now talking was a professional actor and thus likely to have his facial responses under control.

  But he knew of no way in which even the most accomplished thespian in the world could cause the blood to desert his own face in one fell swoop, or bring about a sudden visible burst of perspiration to the temples.

  * * *

  It was evening by the time Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby got to the Ornum Arms at Almstone. Even from the outside of the public house it was apparent that the hostelry was full to overflowing.

  ‘Looks like they’re having a party, sir,’ said Crosby as he manoeuvred the police car around the crowded car park. ‘Parking’s a bit tight.’

  ‘If you scratch this or any other vehicle here,’ observed Sloan dispassionately, ‘they’ll never have you in Traffic Division.’

  ‘Sounds like they’re having a party, too,’ said Crosby, affecting not to have heard him. A door had opened as the two policemen walked towards the entrance to the pub and noise was spilling out all over the car park for all the world like molten metal. Out of the door slid a slight figure who quickly made his way out of the nimbus of light.

  ‘Wayne Goddard,’ said Crosby. ‘Shouldn’t have thought it was like him to leave a party early.’

  ‘He’s either seen us coming,’ said Sloan, ‘or sold out of whatever he’s selling. Come on, Crosby. Let’s get inside before anyone else slinks away.’

  The decibels were even higher inside the building. Johnny Hedger, the brawny licensee, and two barmaids were all pulling pints of beer as fast as they could. Good landlord that he was, Hedger wasn’t too busy to notice the arrival of the newcomers. He waved a hand in greeting and then applied himself again to serving his queueing customers. When the press at the bar had abated a little he raised the counter flap and slipped out from behind the beer handles to join them.

  ‘Evening, gentlemen,’ he began warily. ‘Come to join the party, then? All welcome, of course. Derek said so.’

  ‘Derek?’ enquired Sloan, looking round. ‘Derek who?’

  ‘Oh, Derek’s not here,’ said Johnny Hedger. ‘Couldn’t very well be in the circumstances, could he?’

  ‘Oh? Why not?’

  ‘Because poor Derek’s dead, of course.’

  ‘Like poor Fred,’ murmured Sloan half under his breath.

  ‘Poor Fred?’ The landlord looked quite bewildered.

  ‘Forget it. So poor Derek’s dead, too, is he?’ asked Sloan. The landlord’s words had just caused him to be revisited by a schoolroom memory. ‘Fred’s dead’ was a fragment of English history that had stuck in his mind, like Queen Anne being dead, too. Queen Anne’s death had made less impression on him, though, than that of the son of George II who, had he not been poor Fred and dead, would have been George III instead – or rather, Frederick I.

  Sloan had sometimes wondered if an essay he had once been made to write at school on the natural, and unnatural, propensity of the eldest sons of the monarch not to come to the throne was what had first led his own footsteps in the direction of the police force; inheritance and crime so often being almost inextricably intertwined. He’d called the essay ‘Uneasy lies the head that’s meant to wear the crown’ and been quite pleased with himself.

  ‘And Derek didn’t want anyone to go to his funeral,’ Johnny Hedger was explaining. ‘Anyone at all. Not even his aunts.’ Johnny looked meaningfully in the direction of a small table by a window where two older women were sitting slightly apart from the throng. ‘Perhaps,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘especially not them.’

  ‘The Kirk sisters,’ said Sloan, noting automatically that most of those in the bar were relatively young and male. Jennifer and Alison Kirk looked oddly out of place among the others. ‘From Edsway.’

  ‘All Derek wanted,’ insisted Hedger, ‘was a big party for everyone here the day after he died. Not comfortable words mumbled over his grave that he couldn’t hear anyway.’

  Detective Constable Crosby looked round at the crowd of drinkers. ‘For a wake, you could say it was going full swing.’

  The festive atmosphere was enhanced by the boatman, Horace Boller, who was sitting within easy reach of the bar, cradling a large tankard in his horny hands. For once there was a positively benign expression on his leathery old face.

  The landlord pointed to the shelf behind the bar. ‘There’s a lot of money sitting there for tonight, I can tell you.’

  ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beer-holder,’ remarked Crosby to no one in particular.

  ‘A whip-round?’ asked Sloan, ignoring this.

  Hedger shook his head. ‘No. That would have been chicken feed compared with what’s behind those bottles. There’s proper money there, Inspector. Plenty of it. Derek gave it to me a couple of months ago against today.’ He pointed to a jeroboam standing on the counter. ‘And he stuffed a lot of fifty-pound notes into that for the Lake Ryrie Reserve too.’ He stared at the enormous bottle. ‘It’s usually five-pence pieces that go in there.’

  ‘So he knew he was dying, then.’

  ‘We all did,’ said the publican solemnly. ‘He’d got one of those illnesses that the insurance companies call dread.’

  ‘People forget that not all diseases are curable,’ observed Sloan moderately.

  ‘Derek wasn’t going to get better from this one,’ said Hedger briefly. ‘And he knew it.’

  ‘When you gotta go, you gotta go,’ contributed Crosby.

  ‘Derek said that he was going to enjoy what was left of his life,’ said the publican. ‘And who could blame him for that?’

  ‘No one,’ said Sloan. Every man had to treat his personal rendezvous with death at its disputed barricade in his own way.

  ‘As it happens, there wasn’t a lot of life left for him after that, either.’ Hedger sighed. ‘I lost a good customer when Derek went.’

  ‘Big spender?’ asked Sloan with unconscious cynicism.

  ‘Not really. Not in the ordinary way, but then not long ago, he got his hands on a lot of money.’

  ‘After he’d been told that he was going to snuff it?’ put in Crosby.

  ‘Could be,’ said Hedger, while Detective Inspector Sloan made a mental note. A working policeman was, perforce, always interested in anyone who had large sums of money to fling around.

  Dead or alive.

  The landl
ord suddenly straightened up and became mine host, asking what he could bring the two of them.

  ‘Sorry, Johnny,’ said Sloan. ‘We’re here on business.’

  ‘Who’s done what now, Inspector?’ he asked, conspicuously unalarmed.

  ‘Been seen here at the Ornum Arms and nowhere else since,’ Sloan said succinctly. ‘Last Friday, a week ago today. As to who…’

  ‘Ah, that girl. Yes.’ He frowned. ‘I didn’t see the going of her, I’m afraid. I remember the chap who came with her leaving on his own but she stayed on because someone she knew came in and I noticed him give her a little wave.’

  ‘Any idea who that was?’

  ‘Oh, I know him,’ said Hedger. ‘He’s one of our local residents. Name of Worrow. Nigel Worrow. Lives in a biggish house near the shore. I can tell you one thing, though.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The girl and the first man had had a bit of an up-and-a-downer before he left.’

  ‘You saw that, did you?’

  ‘Well, no, to be honest. I didn’t myself but another customer – someone I’d never seen in here before – told me about it. He’d been sitting in an alcove near them and he came over and sat near the bar instead. Told me he couldn’t stand domestic arguments; that was why he had come to the Ornum Arms in the first place. To get away from them.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan decided not to say anything about the occasions when people who had arguments in public houses rather than private ones needed constabulary assistance to break them up. Usually late on Saturday nights.

  ‘You’d think two people could find something more important to have a row about than new curtains, wouldn’t you?’ said the innkeeper, too calm a man himself to argue with anyone.

  ‘I’m not so sure about that, Johnny.’ He was aware that the words spoken that morning chez Sloan about roses had been harsher than they should have been.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ said the landlord sapiently. ‘After all, Gilbert and Sullivan broke up over a carpet, didn’t they?’

  Sloan hadn’t known the nature of that particular casus belli but he could believe it.

  ‘Hang on, Inspector,’ carried on Hedger, ‘I’ve told one of your men all this already.’

  ‘Just checking, that’s all,’ said Sloan.

  * * *

  ‘What I want to know,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan without preamble, ‘is exactly how the coroner got to know about this mummy being moved to the museum.’ He had sent for Police Constable Douglas Stuart, a man almost too portly for any duty calling for really hard physical activity, first thing the next morning.

  ‘Ah,’ said Doug Stuart, the coroner’s officer.

  That, Sloan reminded him swiftly, did not constitute an answer.

  ‘No, sir. I agree, but …

  One of the more agreeable fantasies which Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan entertained in his mind from time to time was that of being invited to write a testimonial for Police Constable Douglas Stuart in the happy event of his needing one for a different job. Sloan had it ready and waiting in his imagination. ‘Anyone,’ he would write, ‘who gets Douglas Stuart to work for him will be lucky.’

  ‘… we didn’t know then that it was only a mummy, sir,’ mumbled Stuart.

  ‘Ah,’ said Sloan unfairly.

  ‘We thought it was a proper body, you see. One that had been moved without the coroner’s say-so.’

  ‘And what were your precise grounds for entertaining this misapprehension about the coroner’s permission?’ asked Sloan frostily.

  ‘There was a letter that came. No, not a letter, more of a note. Done on a word processor, we thought.’

  ‘To the coroner?’

  ‘It came through the door of his office but it wasn’t addressed to anyone…’

  ‘And well covered with the fingerprints of other people by now, I’ll be bound,’ interrupted Sloan.

  ‘… asking if we knew that a body had been improperly removed from Whimbrel House at Staple St James.’

  ‘I shall need to see that letter.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Stuart made as if to rise and thus escape this interrogation.

  ‘Anything strike you about it?’ said Sloan before the man could lumber to his feet.

  ‘There was no address on it, and it was unsigned, sir.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then I first checked with Morton’s, the undertakers, sir, and they said that they had buried Colonel Caversham from that address months ago but they hadn’t been to the house since.’

  ‘And Whimbrel House? Did you check that?’

  ‘Several times, sir. Silent as the grave. No one there at all. So Mr Locombe-Stableford said he was going to take the matter up with the superintendent. He did do that, sir, didn’t he?’ asked Stuart anxiously. ‘Like he said.’

  ‘He did,’ said Sloan shortly.

  ‘Then we heard a whisper on the grapevine that all the fuss had been about an old Egyptian mummy after all.’

  ‘Only in a manner of speaking,’ said Sloan.

  ‘And then we realized that someone was having us on. I’m very sorry, sir.’

  ‘No, Stuart,’ said Sloan, ‘they weren’t.’ He took a deep breath. ‘It isn’t your fault. They were having us on, not you.’

  Chapter Eight

  Scuffed

  ‘But what I want to know, Sloan,’ declared Superintendent Leeyes testily, ‘is exactly who is having who – that is whom – on.’ The superintendent had recently attended an evening class on English grammar and was now inclined to pedantry.

  ‘And why,’ added Sloan.

  ‘I must say I don’t get it myself, Sloan.’ He sniffed. ‘All this playing about with typed anonymous notes being sent to the coroner. Indeterminate paper without fingerprints, you say.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Talking about fingerprints, sir…’

  The superintendent was undiverted from his train of thought. ‘Why didn’t whoever wrote that letter send it to us instead? Tell me that, Sloan. We get loads of anonymous letters here at the station and I don’t suppose the coroner gets many at all.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s why it went to him, sir. Whoever wrote it might have been afraid it could be overlooked in the pile here. Or not followed up quickly enough for their purposes, whatever they happened to be. We don’t know that yet, either.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Talking about fingerprints, sir…’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Crosby took some prints from the furniture in the flat of a young woman who was reported as having gone missing last week. Name of Jill Carter, of Park Drive, Berebury.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Dr Dabbe got some from the body in the mummy case.’

  ‘Snap?’ he growled.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Sloan soberly. ‘I’m afraid they were what you might call a matching set.’

  The superintendent leant back in his chair and waved his pen in the air. ‘So we can now say that there is one known fact in an uncertain and very murky world.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Sloan assented without enthusiasm. ‘We know the name of the body in the mummy case.’

  ‘The identification of the deceased is something to be going on with, whichever way you look at it, Sloan.’

  ‘True, sir.’ Sloan agreed with him even though ‘Confusion worse confounded’ was the sentiment that was actually going through his mind. ‘The only other thing we have at this moment is the knowledge that someone wanted us to find her.’ Somewhere in his memory was a quotation about what someone didn’t know wasn’t knowledge, but it was proving strangely elusive.

  The superintendent frowned. ‘It’s not a lot, is it?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘But if that particular someone wanted us to find the body,’ said Leeyes, ‘why did they go to the trouble of parking her in that mummy case? Must have taken a lot of effort.’

  ‘I think, sir, it can only be because that someone wanted to control exactly when the story broke.’

  Leeyes grunted. ‘Myself
, I would have thought that putting her under some bushes in the park would have done just as well. People are always poking about in the park.’ He brightened. ‘She might even have been written off as having gone for a lark in the park in the dark. You never know. That’s happened before now. Saved someone a lot of effort.’

  ‘I don’t think so, sir,’ Sloan said repressively. ‘She worked for those accountants in River Street. I’m seeing them next.’ Something his friend Harry Harpe had said came into his mind. ‘Now I come to think of it, they were already short-handed before Jill Carter went missing.’

  ‘As bad as solicitors, accountants.’

  ‘I think she was put where she was and the letter sent to the coroner to control exactly where she was found as well as when,’ spelt out Sloan. ‘So both must be important.’ That, too, was something to be going on with. ‘It’s a question of where we should begin.’

  There was a certain Peter Caversham of Luston to be seen as well: a man waiting in the wings, with a vested interest in nobody else turning up to claim the Caversham inheritance.

  Leeyes cheered up. ‘You’ve got the boyfriend, though, haven’t you?’

  ‘We know where Thornhill is,’ said Sloan cautiously. ‘And statements have been taken.’

  ‘More than once, I hope.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ It was common knowledge in the Force that the superintendent, too, subscribed to the dictum in The Hunting of the Snark: ‘What I tell you three times is true.’

  ‘And, Sloan, don’t let one murder divert you from this drug smuggling business. Drugs kill more people every day than murderers.’

  ‘I won’t forget, sir. Actually, it did occur to me that Horace Boller might have been using the animal rescue place at Edsway for his own purposes.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put anything past him.’

  ‘It would make a good pick-up point for supplies of heroin,’ said Sloan, thinking aloud. ‘You could hide anything over there.’ He made a note. ‘We’ll take a proper look as soon as we get half a moment.’

  * * *

  ‘Just here, Crosby,’ commanded Detective Inspector Sloan from the passenger seat, ‘will do nicely, thank you.’

  There is one respect in particular in which police officers differ from the generality of men and women. This is in the matter of their right to park their vehicles at the kerbside in working hours in crowded roads. River Street, Berebury, where Detective Constable Crosby brought the police car to a standstill in the middle of the morning, was one of the market town’s busiest commercial thoroughfares.