Little Knell

by Catherine Aird

  ‘… were traces of heroin in the kitchen,’ finished Crosby with empressement.

  ‘They did, did they?’ said Sloan, thinking quickly.

  ‘Especially on the table.’

  ‘A thieves’ kitchen.’

  ‘Puts a different complexion on things, doesn’t it, sir?’

  ‘I think, Crosby,’ said Sloan, applying an even older analogy, ‘we may even have identified a modern den of iniquity.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Though we mustn’t forget that both Sid Wetherspoon and Wayne Goddard say that nobody had their key between Tuesday when they first went round there, and Thursday when they arrived with their removal van,’ said Sloan. The visit from the removal men must have had some consequences for whoever was using Whimbrel House for nefarious purposes. He would have to work on that later.

  ‘If you can believe Wayne Goddard, sir, then you can believe anything.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan reminded his subordinate that it was every police officer’s job not to believe anything, ever, until he or she had hard evidence to prove whatever it was.

  ‘Yes, sir. They say the key hung on a hook just inside Sid’s office,’ pressed on Crosby, undeterred by this little homily, ‘with a number of other keys being held for the same reasons.’

  ‘Labelled, I dare say,’ said Sloan bitterly, ‘just to make things easier for anyone who took it. If they did.’ What had made things more straightforward for the police was this link between the death of Jill Carter and the drugs scene. It was something much more positive than that one of her employers had a yacht at Kinnisport and went on long sea trips in the Channel.

  ‘Not exactly labelled, sir,’ said Crosby. ‘It was on one of Puckle’s usual keyrings. The firm have their own.’

  ‘I call that advertising,’ said Sloan. ‘Now, how have you got on with your forensic genealogy?’

  Crosby looked blank.

  ‘The heirs of Colonel Caversham.’

  ‘Oh.’ His face cleared. He reached for his notebook. ‘The colonel’s brother was killed at Dunkirk. His name is on the Staple St James war memorial. He only had one son who was called Gerald…’

  ‘He who ran off with somebody’s daughter?’

  Crosby nodded. ‘She was called Sybil.’

  ‘And they were married.’ Sloan was fairly confident about this. The bend sinister would have put any children of this union quite out of the running for the Caversham family money and thus have been of no interest to Messrs Puckle, Puckle and Nunnery, executors and trustees.

  ‘Yes, sir. The marriage took place in a register office in London. Mr Puckle had got as far as finding that out.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then the trail goes a bit cold,’ said Crosby. ‘The colonel simply told the solicitors that his nephew had gone abroad.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what, sir?’

  ‘And did they have any sons?’

  ‘That’s what no one can find out for sure, sir. All we can establish from all the proper authorities is that someone called Gerald Caversham died, aged seventy-five, last year in India.’

  ‘Big country, India,’ observed Sloan.

  ‘The solicitors have had agents make inquiries out there but they can’t come up with anything positive about the couple having had – er – male issue.’

  ‘Getting nowhere fast, in fact,’ said Sloan.

  ‘And that is all that anyone can discover at this stage, sir,’ said Crosby. ‘Us, too.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan slowly digested the implications of this. ‘I can see Puckle’s problem as executor over the inheritance of the settled estate.’ It was beginning to look as if Jarndyce versus Jarndyce might have nothing on the Executors and Trustees of Caversham deceased versus Caversham living; although the connection, if any, with the use of Whimbrel House for the distribution, storage or usage of heroin eluded him. ‘Not easy.’

  ‘It could be proved that Gerald and Sybil Caversham had had sons, sir; if they had them, that is,’ Crosby put it awkwardly. ‘But not that they hadn’t had any, if they hadn’t; if you know what I mean.’

  ‘I think I do,’ said Sloan gravely. The constable had made the not irrelevant statement ‘Yes, we have no bananas’ sound positively simple and straightforward. ‘And, if they hadn’t, and it could be proved that they hadn’t, then, failing all others, a man called Peter Caversham scoops the pool.’

  ‘He lives at Water Lane, Luston, sir. Number three.’

  ‘Then I think we’d better be on our way there now, Crosby.’

  * * *

  Water Lane, Luston was one of the more insalubrious parts of that unattractive industrial town. It fronted the canal and consisted of a row of small terraced cottages, most of which had been subjected to half-hearted attempts at gentrification since the lock-keepers had moved out. Between them and the edge of the canal was a paved area where once there had been a towpath wide enough for horses. In front of some of the cottages were tubs full of flowering shrubs doing duty as makeshift gardens where there was no soil.

  There were no tubs outside number three.

  And answer came there none to polite knocking or, after that, to more importunate police knocking. The only response was from the house next door. A woman with hair dyed a fierce mahogany colour put her head round her front door and said if they were from the Social Security they’d be lucky getting him in there to come to the door at this hour of the day.

  Detective Inspector Sloan said they weren’t exactly from Social Security, although privately sometimes these days he wondered himself. More and more of the jobs that the police had to do now were definitely more social than security.

  ‘He never opens up until it’s dark,’ the woman said. ‘And then not always.’

  ‘Light hurt his eyes, then?’ asked Crosby.

  She stared at his naivety. ‘Too spaced-out to talk,’ said the woman. ‘And if you were to ask me, he doesn’t want anyone to see his poor arms. His veins are black and blue.’

  ‘Up to speed, is he?’ asked Crosby.

  She gave him another searching look. ‘Gone past speed long ago,’ she said tersely.

  ‘Ah,’ murmured Sloan. ‘Like that, is it?’

  The woman pointed towards the canal. ‘It’s a wonder to me that he hasn’t gone in the water over there when he’s been like that.’

  ‘Is he in work?’ asked Sloan.

  ‘Work?’ she croaked. ‘That’s rich, that is. He hasn’t done a hand’s turn since he’s been here.’

  ‘And where would he be getting the money from for drugs?’ said Detective Inspector Sloan.

  She shrugged. ‘Where do any of them get the money?’ she asked rhetorically. ‘But they do, somehow, from somewhere. Do anything for it, of course.’

  Sloan tried to look ingratiating. ‘Do you happen to have his key by any chance? And his permission to use it, of course,’ he added as a belated concession to the proprieties.

  ‘Key? You don’t need a key to get in there. The door’s never locked and it’s half off its hinges anyway.’ She gave a high cackle. ‘And believe you me, there’s nothing in there to steal.’

  Sloan gave another loud knock on Peter Caversham’s door for form’s sake and then pushed it gently open. He called out Caversham’s name as he and Crosby entered the cottage. The front door gave straight into the main room. Initially, he thought the darkened room – there was an old blanket hooked across the window doing duty as a curtain – was empty, but it wasn’t. There was a half-made bed in the corner; and what at first sight looked like a bundle of blankets turned out to be a human form.

  The two policemen advanced with care but there was no need. The sallow-faced man lying there, although still breathing shallowly, was totally unresponsive to sound and touch. On the floor beside the bed lay an empty hypodermic syringe, its plunger pushed home as far as it would go.

  ‘Dead to the wide,’ said Crosby.

  ‘But not dead yet,’ said Detective
Inspector Sloan. The scene reminded him of nothing so much as the one in the famous painting by the Pre-Raphaelite Henry Wallis of the death of the poet Thomas Chatterton. A police lecturer had once used it to illustrate his talk on fraud and fakes.

  Except that Chatterton had been depicted as dead and this man was living – or partly living.

  ‘Get an ambulance,’ he instructed Crosby wearily. ‘We can’t leave him here like this.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Spotted

  ‘Well, Sloan,’ barked Superintendent Leeyes, ‘everything cut and dried now?’

  ‘Not quite yet, sir.’ Touching base – when that base was the police station at Berebury – was never an entirely unmitigated blessing. He took a deep breath and said, ‘But we’re working on it.’

  ‘Good, good. Then, when you’ve cleared up the murder of this girl, you can get back to dealing with that heroin consignment.’

  ‘It may not be as simple as that, sir.’ He explained that they now knew that Whimbrel House was part of the drug scene.

  ‘Not the boyfriend?’ Leeyes sounded disappointed.

  ‘We don’t have any definite evidence as yet either way as to that, sir.’

  ‘Circumstantial will do at a pinch,’ said his superior officer with a fine disregard for the niceties of the law.

  ‘As far as I can see, sir, there would have been no call for Colin Thornhill – that’s the boyfriend – to go into Whimbrel House, eject a mummy from its case and put the girl in there instead,’ said Sloan patiently, ‘and then tell the coroner about it, when he could have just dumped her in the woods somewhere instead. She could have been missing for months if he had, and the trail gone cold.’ He drew breath. ‘But we’ll be running some drug tests on him anyway.’

  ‘Murder is bizarre,’ pronounced Leeyes grandly. The superintendent gave one of his prodigious frowns. ‘You never know where you are with either murder or drugs, Sloan. Remember that. No two manifestations are ever quite the same.’

  ‘All drug dealers are nothing more than human vampires,’ said Sloan heatedly, the image of Peter Caversham still with him. He knew that not all murderers were: quite often the Family Support Officers would report back to those investigating the crime that the real victim was the individual who had committed the murder – someone driven to do their nearest and dearest to death by the very person whom they’d killed.

  The superintendent came back smartly with the observation that detachment was an important part of police professionalism and that Sloan shouldn’t ever forget it.

  ‘Drug dealers are bloodsuckers who make people dependent on them, sir; and then exploit their victims mercilessly until they haven’t a drop of blood left in their veins or a penny in the bank,’ said Sloan unrepentantly. He had been struck suddenly by the dealers’ resemblance to the ichneumon fly but decided not to mention it.

  ‘You can touch bottom very quickly on some substances,’ conceded the superintendent, who only had a second gin and tonic at the golf club on Sunday mornings if it was offered to him by someone else.

  ‘But heroin’s the quickest by far,’ said Sloan, explaining about Peter Caversham. ‘We shall need to interview him when he’s…’ Sloan paused, casting about in his mind for the right word.

  ‘No use putting “him in the longboat ’till he’s sober” then?’ interrupted Leeyes, on an unusually jovial note.

  ‘Sentient,’ finished Detective Inspector Sloan triumphantly. ‘But it may be some time before he comes round and rejoins the human race. I’ve asked the local people there to keep an eye if he wakes up and walks out of the hospital.’

  The superintendent said he was glad to hear it. ‘It wouldn’t do for ill to befall the man, Sloan, while there is an investigation in progress.’

  ‘No, sir.’ He hesitated. ‘He may have been picked out as a suitable victim … Selected to be turned into an addict, I mean.’

  ‘This Peter Caversham?’

  ‘He had a sporting chance of inheriting the Caversham estate,’ said Sloan. ‘And he may have been the one who steered the drugs people to the empty house.’ All the options would have to be explored. That was what police work was about.

  ‘Money talks,’ said Leeyes elliptically.

  ‘We don’t know whether he knew about it being empty, since the colonel wouldn’t have him anywhere near the place, or,’ he added significantly, ‘whether anyone else did, and if so, who.’

  Leeyes grunted.

  ‘It has been established, sir, that those likely to inherit big money become the especial targets of drug dealers.’

  The superintendent nodded at this. ‘They say the Earl of Ornum has kicked his eldest son into touch.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Stopped him inheriting a penny until he’s twenty-five.’

  ‘So,’ said Sloan drily, ‘all he has to do is to stay clean until then.’

  ‘We can only hope,’ the superintendent added with heavy irony, ‘that he went to the right school.’

  ‘I dare say the pushers pick out their prey quite as carefully as a stalking tiger does,’ said Sloan. ‘With no holds barred.’

  Leeyes drummed his fingers on his desk. ‘And in the meantime?’

  ‘In the meantime, sir, I have put the rose bushes in tubs on the patio outside the back of my house in full view of anyone who cares to take a look over the back fence, and told – that is asked – my wife to accept any further deliveries that come.’

  ‘That’s all you can do, Sloan.’ One winter the superintendent had attended an adult education class on Twentieth-Century British Prime Ministers. For some unfathomable reason it had been Herbert Henry Asquith who had taken his fancy. He had quoted the great man’s favourite remark ever since. He did so now. ‘Wait and see.’

  ‘And told my wife to accept any other deliveries that may come,’ repeated Sloan, ‘but not on any account to open them.’

  * * *

  ‘We have a few more questions further to our inquiries into the death of Jill Carter,’ Detective Inspector Sloan announced with a certain formality at the offices of Pearson, Worrow and Gisby. ‘We should like to see both partners.’

  Detective Constable Crosby was quite taken aback when they were shown into the firm’s interview room. ‘Better than ours, sir.’

  ‘It’s the carpet that does it,’ murmured Sloan absently.

  The two accountants reached the room together, both professing a willingness to help the police with their inquiries in any way they could. But naturally, they insisted.

  Sloan was well aware that normal police custom and practice – let alone PACE rules – held that persons being interviewed should be accompanied by their legal adviser and no one else; and certainly not be spoken to together with someone else who was also due to be questioned. This was because, when two or more persons were involved in an inquiry, the resulting separate statements could then be compared for any disparities.

  It was what his mother, that staunch churchwoman, always called the ‘Susannah and the elders method, dear’.

  Like the Prophet Daniel in the Apocrypha, the detective branch were great on spotting disparities between witness statements. Disparities led the police straight to what their press office always called ‘Further inquiries’, which was public relations-speak for: Watch this space: more to come.

  There was another school of thought, though, and Sloan belonged to it: question two people at the same time about the same thing and tensions arose. Palpable tensions could sometimes be very significant.

  ‘There are things we need to know,’ he began now.

  This was not an official interview.

  Yet.

  This was the police seeking information. And this was one detective inspector very anxious indeed to observe the byplay between two men, and a detective constable not interested in anything very much. The partners were two men one or both of whom might just possibly know a great deal more about: the late Jill Carter; a consignment of heroin that had fallen into official
hands; a drug addict called Peter Caversham; or even the Lake Ryrie Project in the faraway Kingdom of Lasserta.

  Detective Inspector Sloan was prepared to concede that it was equally possible that one man knew and the other man might suspect, but not know, something about one or all of these. And either man, though he did not himself know about any of these things, might perhaps suspect that his partner did.

  That might emerge, too.

  Sloan began his questions with the Lake Ryrie Project, and was aware that both accountants immediately relaxed. It wasn’t anything at Lake Ryrie then, that they had been expecting the two policemen to come to see them about.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jim Pearson, looking puzzled. ‘We audit the British end of their balance sheet – such as it is. We only charge them a nominal fee. They’re one of Howard Air’s good causes; he does a lot of charity work.’

  ‘Theirs is one of the accounts our David Barton has always handled, but he’s been out of action since his car accident,’ put in Nigel Worrow, manifestly untroubled. ‘I expect it’s one of the little jobs that poor Jill picked up when she came to us. She was only a trainee, you know, so she only had small accounts to handle.’

  ‘Not a lot of money involved in the Lake Ryrie Project anyway, in spite of Howard Air’s best efforts,’ said Jim Pearson, dismissively. ‘People would rather give to the Animal Rescue place at Edsway. They like to see where their money’s going.’

  ‘I don’t blame them,’ came in Detective Constable Crosby, stoutly. His own early contacts with human cupidity had left him surprised at how many people took financial matters on trust.

  ‘I rather think I signed them off myself,’ said Worrow vaguely. ‘Can’t be sure, though.’

  ‘How does the actual money get out there?’ asked Sloan.

  ‘Oh, the Calleford and County Bank’ll do all that for them,’ said Pearson. ‘No problem.’

  ‘They’ll do the conversion from sterling into that odd currency they have out there easily enough,’ supplemented his partner. ‘I can’t remember what it is…’

  ‘Lemps,’ said Jim Pearson, still visibly untroubled.

  ‘We will obviously need a list of all clients whose accounts Jill Carter was working on.’ Detective Inspector Sloan shifted his ground, seeking another, more sensitive area to probe.