Little Knell

by Catherine Aird

  ‘I must say they’re pretty quick workers, sir.’

  ‘They’ve had a week, haven’t they? If this girl, Jill Carter, was killed last Friday.’

  ‘Sorry, sir, I was forgetting.’

  Superintendent Leeyes tapped his pen on his desk. ‘It just goes to show, Sloan, what you can do with unlimited resources.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘It’s all very well for some people…’

  ‘My wife?’ said Sloan, puzzled.

  ‘Drug barons,’ said Leeyes succinctly. ‘They’ve got all the money in the world.’

  That was what Jenny, the forensic accountant, had said, too.

  ‘And all the time, too,’ said Sloan, conscious of how much there was still to be done.

  ‘And we haven’t either the time or the money,’ commented Leeyes. He sniffed. ‘Especially not the money.’

  ‘No, sir,’ Sloan hastened to agree. Other police forces had Drug Squads; Berebury had Sloan and Crosby. ‘These roses, sir…’

  ‘Ah, yes, Sloan. The roses.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘What do you propose doing about them?’

  Detective Inspector Sloan took a deep breath. ‘As I see it, sir, we have two options.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I can send them back to Lingard and Lingard and get an eye kept there … Or,’ said Sloan, ‘I could put them out on my patio and see what happens.’

  ‘Any further developments might well be interesting,’ conceded the superintendent. ‘Very interesting. Be sure to keep me in the picture.’

  * * *

  ‘Here’s your week’s money, Goddard, and my brother says you needn’t come Monday.’

  Sid Wetherspoon’s brother had his uses; especially when he wasn’t present. On some occasions when Fred Wetherspoon wasn’t there, Sid would begin his spiel with ‘My brother and I’; especially if he didn’t relish what he had to say.

  This was one of those occasions. Sid went on, ‘My brother and I, young feller, don’t think that you’re cut out for working in the removals business. Not really.’

  ‘No, Mr Wetherspoon.’ Wayne Goddard didn’t bother to raise his eyebrows. There was nothing at which he needed even to feign surprise. He had realized most of the week that his days with Wetherspoon and Wetherspoon were numbered. The manager of the Job Centre wouldn’t like it of course, but then he never did; and anyway he ought to be used to Wayne’s being stood off at the end of his first week with each new employer by now. On the whole, he would probably be more upset than Wayne himself was.

  ‘You see,’ Wetherspooon said, not unkindly, ‘you haven’t got the muscle…’

  Actually, now he came to think about it, Sid had never seen Wayne Goddard’s muscles, since – no matter how hot it was – the lad hadn’t once rolled his sleeves up to get down to work. It was one of Sid’s grievances, only these days employers weren’t allowed to have grievances. Only workers seemed to be entitled to those now.

  ‘No,’ agreed the puny Wayne without rancour.

  ‘So we – my brother and I – think you’d do better in some other sort of work.’ Sid was making a real effort to choose his words carefully. These days it was more difficult, too, to sack people than it had been. To say nothing of then not being able to take on who you wanted instead. It was the lurking fear of having to employ a woman under the new equal opportunity legislation that had very nearly led to Wayne’s keeping his job with Wetherspoon and Wetherspoon, as the lesser of two evils.

  ‘Yes, Mr Wetherspoon.’

  ‘Mind you, boy, it hasn’t got anything to do with those two policemen coming round here wanting to know everything we’ve done this week at Whimbrel House.’

  ‘No?’ Wayne Goddard’s eyebrows did go up at this.

  ‘No,’ said Sid untruthfully. Actually, it had been the last straw as far as the brothers Wetherspoon were concerned. It wasn’t that Sid had minded being grilled by Detective Inspector Sloan; he had been quite happy at his own answers. It was the uneasiness that Sid had felt at Wayne Goddard’s responses which had stayed with him after the police had left, and it was still worrying him.

  ‘Right then. I’ll be on my way.’ Goddard reached out a hand for his pay packet.

  Sid kept his hand on the envelope. ‘All the forms you need are in there…’

  ‘Right,’ said Goddard again, hand still extended.

  ‘… but there’s something I’d like to know before you go.’

  ‘What’s that then?’

  ‘Who did you tell that we’d looked round Whimbrel House on Tuesday first while we sized the job up for yesterday?’

  ‘Me?’ Goddard’s face assumed its innocent choirboy expression. ‘No one. No one at all. Honest, Mr Wetherspoon.’

  * * *

  ‘You must remember, gentlemen,’ said Dr Dabbe, emphasizing his point by waving an alarming-looking instrument of unknown purpose at the two detectives across his desk at the mortuary, ‘that, in the words of a very distinguished epidemiologist, “Death certificates are merely passports to civilized burial”.’

  ‘And to keep the coroner happy,’ said Sloan sardonically.

  Dabbe smiled. ‘I understand this mummy isn’t going to get a civilized burial.’

  ‘It’s going to the Greatorex Museum,’ said Detective Constable Crosby.

  ‘There you are, then,’ said the pathologist, putting the instrument down, and picking up a pen instead.

  ‘But only,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan pointedly, ‘when Mr Locombe-Stableford is completely satisfied that it is of purely archaeological interest.’

  ‘Which, as I explained to you yesterday in similar circumstances, a radiological examination should confirm.’

  ‘Today,’ murmured Detective Constable Crosby under his breath, ‘if not yesterday.’

  ‘That,’ the pathologist shot a wry glance in the inspector’s direction, ‘is the theory, anyway. However, I have arranged for a very well-known palaeopathologist, known to Marcus Fixby-Smith, to assist me in my examination of the mummy. He’s on his way.’

  Crosby grinned. ‘That should keep both the coroner and the curator happy.’

  ‘Doctor,’ intervened Sloan hastily, ‘yesterday you mentioned the dangers of opening up the actual mummy…’ Had it really only been yesterday? It seemed days ago. ‘Now that we’ve actually got a mummy, I’d like to know what those dangers are.’ Having life insurance was all very well but it didn’t compare with having life.

  ‘Anthrax is the main risk,’ said Dr Dabbe, at once becoming hortative. ‘Bacillus anthracis forms spores and these do exist for very long periods in a viable stage outside the human body.’ He twirled his pen between his fingers. ‘Didn’t you know? That’s what makes it into a weapon of war. Relatively inexpensive, too.’

  ‘War?’ echoed Crosby, who was sure he’d already been taught everything about man’s inhumanity to man at the Police Training College.

  ‘Very popular with some of our enemies, anthrax,’ the doctor informed him. ‘They stocked it, you know, even if it didn’t get used.’

  ‘Not us, though?’ said Crosby.

  ‘Oh, we stocked it, too,’ said Dr Dabbe airily, ‘purely for the purposes of scientific research, of course. On an island in Gruinard Bay in Scotland. They say it’s all right now.’

  All Detective Inspector Sloan could think of was that character in the radio programme ITMA who had been sick but said she ‘was all right now’. He hoped the same could be said for Gruinard Island.

  ‘But in a mummy?’ persisted Crosby, still anxious.

  ‘Oh, yes, my boy. The spores have been found in ancient mummies before now, as I shall explain to the coroner if the X-rays are inconclusive.’

  ‘I thought anthrax was a disease of sheep,’ murmured Sloan without thinking. He, like most policemen, had in his time pinned up many a public notice about warble fly.

  ‘Well, it is one of the zoonoses, Sloan,’ expounded the pathologist happily, ‘and the clostridia are species specific.’

&nb
sp; ‘Does that mean what I think it means?’ asked Sloan.

  Dr Dabbe beamed. ‘It does. One variety is actually called Woolsorter’s Disease.’

  ‘Well, I never,’ said Crosby.

  ‘That’s the pulmonary variety,’ said the pathologist.

  One of the few judicial remarks that Sloan remembered was ‘Let us to our muttons’. He didn’t quote it now. He thought it was about time they got away from sheep. Instead he said firmly, ‘The mummy can only go to the museum, of course, when the police too are completely satisfied that the mummy itself has no essential connection with the body of the girl who was in the cartonnage.’

  Dr Dabbe looked over the other instruments on the tray before selecting a long probe. ‘Shall we say that the cartonnage was probably, as Shakespeare put it so well, only “A shell of death”?’

  ‘We think that Jill Carter was dead when she was put in it,’ Sloan informed him, taking this literally. ‘The forensic people have confirmed that from their examination of the wood. They think she’d stopped bleeding by the time she was put in there.’

  Dabbe nodded. ‘That blow on the head would have killed her outright. By the way, I don’t know if it’s important to you chaps or not but she wasn’t pregnant.’ He waved a hand in the direction of his office. ‘It’ll all be in my report.’

  ‘Was she on drugs, doctor?’ asked Sloan.

  ‘Not in my opinion. At least, I could find no immediate evidence of banned substances and I can assure you that there were no macroscopic signs of drug taking: ropy veins, injection sites, infected haematomata and so forth.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Sloan, making a note.

  ‘But I can’t tell you definitely yet whether she had liver damage as a consequence of suffering from one or more of the happy family of hepatitises.’ He paused. ‘Or should that be hepatiti?’

  ‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure, doctor,’ said Sloan repressively. If there was one change in police procedure which had really made him wonder at the modern world, it was the official turning of the police blind eye to the needle exchange system set up in Berebury by the over-socially-conscious to save drug addicts from the blood diseases spread by sharing needles for their self-injection of proscribed substances. Nelson himself couldn’t have done it better. Cost-effective in the broadest sense was how the idea had been sold to an outraged but outwardly compliant Calleshire Constabulary.

  ‘But all will be revealed,’ said the pathologist sedately, ‘when I get the lab reports on the deceased back.’

  ‘In due course,’ said Crosby, totally without inflection.

  ‘What we’re really interested in now, doctor,’ intervened Sloan hastily, ‘is the timing of events.’

  ‘Where and when,’ Crosby supplemented this quite unnecessarily.

  The pathologist looked suddenly serious again. ‘In my opinion, gentlemen, Jill Carter had been dead roughly about a week before I examined her.’

  ‘Like the day she went missing?’ suggested Crosby. ‘Last Friday.’

  ‘Possibly. Going first on the expected post-mortem lividity and then on the later changes in that – alteration at the points where there would have been pressure from a wooden casing designed for someone else and so forth – I should say she had been dead for some days before she was encased in the cartonnage in which I first saw her, and had been in it for at least twenty-four hours.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan had been thinking as well as listening. ‘That means she was parked somewhere else before she was put in there.’

  Dr Dabbe agreed. ‘But perhaps that is more likely to be definitely established from other than medical evidence.’

  ‘They’re still going over her clothing at forensic,’ said Crosby, ‘and going all over the house, too.’

  ‘And we’ve got a team going over the car park where the girl was last seen,’ said Sloan. ‘There may be blood there…’

  He did not feel it necessary to add that the same skilled team of specialists in forensic evidence were about to examine the interior of the car belonging to one of her employers – the accountant and amateur yachtsman Nigel Worrow.

  Chapter Twelve

  Worn

  ‘Anthony Heber-Hibbs here…’

  ‘This is Detective Inspector Sloan of the Calleshire Constabulary, your excellency, and I’m ringing from England.’ Had he got that right, Sloan wondered. He wasn’t used to addressing ambassadors, even if it was over the telephone; and halfway round the world to boot.

  ‘How may I help you, Inspector?’ said a pleasant-sounding very English voice.

  ‘Just a routine inquiry, sir, about an animal protection reserve in Lasserta.’ Offhand, Sloan couldn’t even remember what the postage stamps of Lasserta looked like – and he’d learned geography by philately.

  ‘The Lake Ryrie Project? What about it?’

  ‘This may sound a little silly to you, sir, but we’re ringing to confirm that the reserve actually exists.’

  ‘I’ll say. Does a good job here, too. Tell me more.’

  ‘That’s all we really needed to know,’ said Sloan apologetically, ‘but we are involved in a money-laundering inquiry here.’

  ‘In lemps, Inspector?’ His excellency sounded amused. ‘Are you sure it’s in lemps?’

  ‘Lemps?’

  ‘That’s the currency here.’

  ‘No, no, sir. It’s just that we know one of the more popular ways of getting illicit funds out of any country is to invent a plausible but totally imaginary set-up somewhere abroad, and send the money there under that pretext.’

  Anthony Heber-Hibbs said alertly, ‘I get you, Inspector.’

  ‘Preferably,’ added Sloan, ‘where the imaginary project can reasonably be supposed to have funding from other countries, too.’

  ‘Like the Lake Ryrie Project…’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So that anyone enquiring could be told the money is coming from somewhere else,’ mused the ambassador thoughtfully.

  ‘Preferably from somewhere where the enquirer doesn’t have any jurisdiction,’ said Sloan tightly. This was a perennial sore point with those who sought to arraign lawbreakers and had to watch them slip through their fingers as a consequence of diplomatic niceties, corrupt regimes, ancient treaties and the fallout from old wars.

  ‘Well, Inspector,’ observed Heber-Hibbs, ‘while I can’t actually hear the animals howling from the embassy, I can assure you that they are in the Lake Ryrie compound all right.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ Sloan made a note. ‘That means there is one avenue of inquiry that we here needn’t pursue any further – which will be a help.’

  ‘Especially the last few Piddock’s Jasper,’ Mr Heber-Hibbs informed him.

  ‘Pardon, sir?’

  ‘The Kingdom of Lasserta is the only place in the world where Piddock’s Jasper still exists. A protected species, of course.’

  ‘Ah, I understand, sir. A rare breed.’

  ‘A charming little jungle monkey, which as you may imagine, has to be kept at a considerable distance from the lions. They keep hoping they will breed in captivity here – the Jaspers, not the lions.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I’m sure. Well, that’s all I need to know.’ He stopped, struck by a sudden thought. ‘Do you grow opium in Lasserta?’

  ‘Bless you, no, Inspector.’ The ambassador laughed. ‘I’m happy to say that pineapples are our main export crop. As far as I know they are as pure as driven snow. No, perhaps snow isn’t the right analogy if your money-laundering has anything to do with drug dealing.’

  ‘No, sir. I mean, yes.’ Detective Inspector Sloan was ready to dismiss pineapples – until he remembered cloves. There had once been a famous attempt to corner the market in cloves and hold the commercial world to ransom. There was no world shortage of pineapples, though, that he knew about. ‘Is anything else grown much in Lasserta?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Bananas, short and curly but very good, mangoes, and a rather special sweet variety of a Lassertan rhubarb. That s
ells very well.’

  Just in time, Detective Inspector Sloan suppressed an unfortunate reference to a banana republic. Lasserta was, after all, a kingdom.

  ‘Our commercial attaché would be able to fill you in properly on the trading here, Inspector,’ Heber-Hibbs was saying. ‘He’d be your man for that sort of detail, if it’s important.’

  ‘No thank you, sir,’ said Sloan. ‘But it’s good to hear about a flourishing economy overseas rather than a corrupt one.’

  There was a significant pause and then the ambassador said gently, as one instructing the young and innocent, ‘There are some foreign countries, Inspector, where it is accepted that a little corruption is good for trade.’

  ‘Really, sir?’ he said coolly.

  ‘But rest assured that the exports from here which find their way to your Calleshire are the pick of the crop.’

  ‘Howard Air Limited?’ divined Sloan without too much difficulty.

  ‘One of the biggest customers for our pineapples and the subsidiary crops, too,’ Heber-Hibbs said. ‘And very particular about quality.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan said he was glad to hear it.

  ‘He’s the moving spirit behind the Lake Ryrie Project, by the way. Ask him. He’ll tell you all about it.’

  * * *

  ‘Well, not exactly progress, sir,’ said Detective Constable Crosby cautiously when he answered Sloan’s summons to his office. ‘More like getting some routine information in.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘The fingerprint people can’t find anything useful on the cartonnage,’ said Crosby.

  ‘I wouldn’t have supposed that they would,’ said Sloan irritably. ‘We’re not dealing with amateurs.’

  ‘And the Scenes of Crime outfit confirm that there are no exterior signs of breaking and entering at Whimbrel House. So whoever’s been coming and going’s had a key.’

  ‘Coming and going?’ barked Sloan sharply.

  ‘Yes, sir. Forensic say that what they did find at Whimbrel House…’ He turned over the page of his notebook with provocative deliberation.

  ‘Well?’ snapped Sloan. He wasn’t going to play games with Crosby, but sorting him out would have to wait a little longer.