Little Knell

by Catherine Aird

  ‘No problem,’ repeated Jim Pearson helpfully. ‘We didn’t put any of the really difficult stuff her way, of course, just the routine, run-of-the-mill accounts.’

  ‘The bread-and-butter ones,’ agreed Worrow.

  ‘Is there anything else you need, Inspector?’ asked Pearson.

  ‘Whatever you have on record about Peter Caversham,’ said Sloan, his eyes apparently studiously downcast. They weren’t so downcast though for him to be unaware of the reaction he’d provoked. On the contrary.

  Worrow stiffened at once and exchanged a swift glance with his partner. ‘That’s quite different, Inspector. We’d have to have our client’s say-so before we disclosed anything about his finances to anyone.’ He appealed to his partner. ‘Wouldn’t we, Jim?’

  ‘That or a court order, Inspector,’ said Jim Pearson, suddenly more formal himself. ‘We couldn’t agree to a fishing expedition.’

  ‘You wouldn’t happen to have Horace Boller on your books, by any chance, would you?’ asked Crosby, out of the blue.

  ‘The boatman at Edsway?’ Nigel Worrow gave a hollow laugh. ‘Not likely. I shouldn’t think he’s got two pennies to rub together.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know…’ objected his partner. ‘It would never surprise me if old Horace hadn’t got a nest egg somewhere. Appearances can be deceptive.’

  ‘Not him, Jim, surely…’

  ‘Mind you.’ Pearson grimaced. ‘I don’t see him as a taxpayer, somehow.’

  Worrow essayed a thin smile. ‘Not his style, I grant you.’

  Two of the many things Detective Inspector Sloan had learned in a long career in the police force were that the chemistry of social interaction wasn’t deceptive, and that body language seldom lied. Even the ancients knew that. The Pinocchio effect – the nose that lengthened with each succeeding lie – had been founded on fact, after all. The nose did swell when a man lied. Antihistamines or something. So that medieval headpiece with the long nose, reserved for liars, had been grounded in pure and simple observation by his detective antecedents. He pulled himself together.

  Nigel Worrow hadn’t liked what Jim Pearson had said about Horace Boller one little bit, and neither Nigel Worrow nor Jim Pearson had relished any mention at all of Peter Caversham.

  On the way back to the police station Sloan idly asked Crosby what he had made of the firm of Pearson, Worrow and Gisby.

  ‘I bet that they even charge you for sneezing,’ said that detective constable, oblivious to undercurrents and hidden agendas alike.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Used

  ‘I think, sir, we might be beginning to make some headway.’ Detective Inspector Sloan had sought out Superintendent Leeyes at the earliest possible moment to make his report.

  ‘At long last, Sloan,’ said Superintendent Leeyes, never one to award verbal rosettes for anything less than conviction and sentence – and preferably a long sentence at that – in the Crown Court.

  ‘That is, sir, we may just be getting near enough to the truth to be frightening someone.’

  ‘Good, good,’ said the superintendent heartily. ‘Fear is always a factor in murder, Sloan. And it can be a factor for good, too, don’t forget.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘There’s healthy fear. You’ve only to look at the death threats you get from doctors these days.’

  Sloan placed the source of this accusation quite easily: straight to the superintendent’s paunch, to the size of which the police doctor had lately taken great exception.

  ‘You see, sir,’ he said, averting his gaze from his superior officer’s burgeoning girth, ‘my wife tells me we’ve just had another special delivery at home.’

  Leeyes grunted. ‘So someone’s hoping you’ll settle for the ha’pence rather than the kicks?’

  ‘For a bit more than ha’pence,’ said Sloan feelingly.

  ‘What is it this time? More roses?’

  ‘Tickets for two on a special luxury tour of the great gardens of Europe, no extras.’

  ‘They know your weak spots, don’t they?’ growled Leeyes.

  ‘It’s the trip we always planned to take when I retired,’ he said with dignity.

  ‘So someone’s done their homework, Sloan.’

  ‘Paid for in cash at the travel company’s head office,’ he said, ‘for a Mr and Mrs C. D. Sloan of Berebury.’

  ‘Hitting where it hurts,’ mused Leeyes. He lifted a bushy eyebrow at an angle that Wayne Goddard would have envied.

  ‘It’s seeing the gardens I – we – would have been going for,’ insisted Sloan. ‘Not the luxury.’

  ‘Quite right,’ said Leeyes, adding obscurely, ‘The nuts come when the teeth have gone.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Another interesting thing is that this tour leaves the country first thing Monday morning.’

  ‘And so,’ concluded Leeyes weightily, ‘some person or persons unknown are indicating they very much hoped that you would be on it.’

  ‘And thus off their backs,’ said Sloan.

  The superintendent drummed his fingers on the top of his desk. ‘Which must mean, Sloan, that you are a bit nearer the mark than you think.’

  ‘I can see the significance of that, sir,’ admitted Sloan. ‘But what I can’t see is in what way I – that is we – might be near anything.’

  He was still smarting from an encounter with the toffee-nosed senior partner of Ickham and Grove, Chartered Accountants of St Matthew’s Court, Berebury. Entering their discreetly opulent offices had had a lot in common with arriving at the reception counter of a five-star hotel. Christian names had not been bandied about by staff or anyone else. ‘Howard Air’s accountants, sir, assure us that all their clients are men and women of unimpeachable probity.’

  ‘No such thing,’ came back Leeyes smartly. ‘Everyone’s got their price.’

  ‘And that they, Ickham and Grove that is, would not be auditing them if they weren’t.’

  ‘That’s unnatural for a start,’ said Leeyes, ever the police officer.

  ‘Moreover, sir, their senior partner assured me that Howard Air’s business and private accounts demonstrated him to be an astute, hard-working and successful businessman.’

  ‘You’d think he’d be clever enough to be on the fiddle, then,’ said Leeyes unfairly, ‘wouldn’t you?’

  ‘And that’s quite apart from his local political and charitable works.’

  ‘He’s not on the Town Council Planning Committee, I hope, Sloan?’ said Leeyes. ‘Lead us not into temptation, and all that.’

  ‘No, sir. Just Museums and Amenities.’

  The superintendent wasn’t interested in Museums and Amenities.

  ‘And Ickham and Grove are quite happy for us to examine any or all of Air’s accounts, provided they have his consent.’

  ‘Hrrrmph.’

  ‘They could see no reason for this to be withheld.’ The auditors had insisted to Sloan that Mr Air was always very helpful and cooperative. They had signally failed, though, to smile at the inspector’s pointing out the biblical connection with their address. The remark that Matthew had been a tax gatherer had provoked no response at all.

  ‘Which means that there’s nothing to be found there,’ said Leeyes dismissively. ‘Now, what is to be done about this continental trip you’ve had the tickets for?’

  This was something that had been taxing Sloan.

  ‘I thought, sir, if my wife were to do some shopping for new summer dresses the word might get around.’

  ‘Good thinking.’

  ‘And perhaps some extra photographic film. The camera shop man is a great gossip. She could chat him up: tell him we were off and so forth.’

  ‘But nothing to come out of our imprest account,’ rejoined Leeyes spiritedly when he mentioned this.

  ‘No, sir. Out of mine.’ He coughed. ‘There’s something else…’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Ought I to book myself off-duty for Monday?’

  The atmosphere in the room changed on the in
stant and the superintendent began to look every year of his age. ‘The enemy within?’

  ‘One can’t be too careful.’

  ‘Even police station walls have ears,’ said Leeyes, more melancholy than Sloan had ever known him before, ‘especially where drugs are concerned.’

  ‘These people, whoever they are, do seem so very omniscient.’

  ‘That’s the trouble with drug dealing. It doesn’t follow the rules. Remember that.’

  ‘Which doesn’t make our job any easier,’ said Sloan feelingly.

  ‘It isn’t an easy job to begin with. You should know that by now, Sloan.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘By the way, has Crosby’s contribution amounted to very much?’ asked the superintendent, rapidly regaining his usual aplomb. ‘Since you seem to be acknowledging his existence by the use of the plural.’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Sloan tersely. He’d quite forgotten for the moment the class on English grammar once attended by the superintendent. ‘But there’s always the hope that he’ll come up with something.’

  Leeyes grunted again.

  ‘On the other hand,’ persisted Sloan, ‘with whoever’s trying to bribe me…’

  ‘Before they put the frighteners on,’ interrupted Leeyes, true Job’s comforter. ‘That’ll come next, Sloan, and don’t say you haven’t been warned.’

  ‘… there is also the very real possibility,’ continued Sloan, ‘that they might be wanting to put me off doing the next thing I had planned.’

  ‘And what is that, might I ask?’

  ‘Searching the Calleshire Animal Rescue Centre at Edsway, sir. I got a quick look at it while I was over there.’

  ‘Possibilities?’

  ‘There’s a dozen places and more where you could easily hide up any amount of drugs as soon as they were got ashore.’ He wrinkled his nose at the memory of the animal sanctuary. ‘And however much they smelt, no one would be any the wiser.’

  ‘Boller goes there every day,’ mused Leeyes, ‘and that accountant fellow Worrow sails off Edsway most weekends, you said.’

  Sloan nodded. ‘But what I really want to be let known, sir, and reported in the newspapers as soon as possible, is that Colin Thornhill…’

  ‘The boyfriend?’

  ‘… is here at the police station helping us with our inquiries.’

  * * *

  ‘They looked like policemen to me, Mr Caversham,’ said the woman with the mahogany-coloured hair from next door.

  The man on the bed muttered something.

  Unwashed, unshaven and barely properly clothed, something intangible which she couldn’t begin to define still stopped her addressing this wreck of a man by his Christian name. She said, ‘You can always tell with policemen, can’t you?’

  The man looked at her blankly with narrowed pupils.

  ‘Policemen,’ she repeated. ‘Before you were taken into hospital.’

  He stirred as if movement hurt him.

  ‘They came to see you yesterday,’ she said.

  He groaned as if it was not movement now but reality that was painful.

  ‘I told them the door was open,’ she said apologetically. ‘I know I needn’t have done but they could have always got a warrant, couldn’t they?’ The people who lived down by the canal were wise, worldly-wise, in their generation from bitter experience.

  He made a sound that might have been agreement.

  ‘They looked at you,’ she said, not unkindly, ‘and then they went away.’

  He groaned again, his adulterated mind slowly returning from wherever it had been while under the influence of heroin.

  ‘You’ll feel better soon,’ his neighbour said, knowing it to be untrue. He’d been happier, much happier, in that nirvana which lay well beyond the Land of Nod. It was the here and now which held no attractions for Peter Caversham by comparison, and very well she – and he – knew it.

  He tried to hitch himself up on an elbow but fell back on the bed at his first attempt. His second effort was more successful, although it appeared that the world as seen from this perspective was no better than when he had been lying down. He showed signs of resuming his supine position but his neighbour stopped him by deftly inserting a pillow behind his shoulders.

  ‘Ah…’ Peter Caversham let out the sound almost as if it was an involuntary response.

  It was enough for his neighbour. ‘You’ll be able to manage something to drink then,’ she said, going off to the kitchen. ‘That’s if I can find anything here fit for a dog to drink,’ she muttered to herself. ‘If not, it’ll have to be water.’

  Water it was. Getting the sallow-faced man to drink it proved more difficult. More experienced in these matters than she would have cared to admit, the woman brought the water to him not in a cup or a glass tumbler but in a small milk jug. She stood over Peter Caversham as if he was a child while he raised his damp and shaking hands to the lip of the jug and drank.

  His furred tongue moistened, the capacity for speech seemed to return to him. ‘God, I feel awful.’

  ‘You smell awful, too,’ said his neighbour, stepping back as the man’s offensive breath struck her nostrils. ‘Ughhh…’

  He ignored this. ‘The post, has it come?’

  She brought his letters to him. He riffled urgently through them, fighting all the time to overcome his tremor. He was seeking the one that mattered to him most, the thin brown envelope with the benefit money in it that he needed so badly. He quickly found the one he wanted and tore it open with fumbling fingers, not bothering at all with a thick cream envelope addressed to Peter Caversham, Esquire.

  That envelope wasn’t thin and brown. It was made of very good quality paper indeed and carried the address of the offices of Messrs Puckle, Puckle and Nunnery, Solicitors and Notaries Public of Berebury, on the back.

  He did not even turn it over.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Hinge Cracked

  ‘I reckon we’re just going round in circles now, sir,’ said Detective Constable Crosby gloomily, plonking a pile of folders heavily down on Sloan’s desk. ‘This lot is from Pearson, Worrow and Gisby: the files of all the clients that the deceased had been working on, as we requested.’

  ‘That’s our next job, Crosby,’ Sloan said bracingly. ‘You’ll have to get cracking with your calculator.’

  The detective constable sniffed. ‘Not that those accountant people are ever going to send us anything worthwhile, anyway, are they, sir? Not them; they’re not that silly.’

  ‘Not anything that they have reason to believe is worthwhile,’ agreed Detective Inspector Sloan, scrupulously exact.

  His private perception of his own small office always swung wildly from that of sanctum to that of bed of nails. Crosby’s mere arrival – let alone his pessimism – had sent it straight to the latter category.

  ‘But they may not know, Crosby…’ He reached his hand out. ‘Let me see the Lake Ryrie balance sheet anyway. It’s the only name we know at the moment.’

  Crosby flipped his way through a pile of folders and extracted one. ‘Here you are, sir. Annual accounts of the Lake Ryrie Reserve, Lasserta.’

  Sloan opened it without any idea of what to look for. He almost lost interest when he found he was considering a set of statements of an account which showed under a thousand pounds as having been transmitted to Lasserta in the last financial year.

  ‘That,’ he said, ‘is not a hill of beans these days. I reckon we can tick that one off. I don’t think we really need to worry about the grand total of £947 sent to Lasserta last year.’

  Crosby wasn’t interested in figures but he remained gloomy. ‘I reckon that just at this minute, sir, there’s more that we don’t know about this girl’s murder than what we do…’

  ‘More people always know Tom Fool, Crosby.’

  ‘For starters,’ continued Crosby morosely, ignoring this last, ‘we don’t even know why Jill Carter was killed yet…’

  ‘No.’

  ‘
… unless it was by her other half, and then in that case I suppose we don’t need to.’

  ‘That remark, Crosby, is a sad indictment of either your sex education or your constable’s training, or both.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Forget it,’ said Sloan immediately. ‘Remember instead that nor do we know why the coroner was told about her death. Or why he was told in the stirring-up manner he was.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘And that’s the oddest thing of all, that is. Doesn’t make sense.’

  Crosby said, ‘And we don’t know why her body was put in that mummy case in Whimbrel House in the first place.’

  ‘Not even that,’ agreed Sloan. He added mildly, ‘Actually, Crosby, we don’t need to know why she was killed or why she was put in the case. We just need to know who by.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Assuming both actions to have been taken by one and the same person or persons.’

  The detective constable wasn’t listening. ‘And then there’s all these drugs…’

  ‘They haven’t gone away,’ concurred Sloan solemnly, ‘although some of them are now safe in the arms of our friends the Customs and Excise.’

  ‘But, sir, we don’t know yet for sure whether drugs’ve got anything to do with the girl’s murder…’

  ‘Or everything to do with it,’ pointed out Sloan. ‘Since there was heroin where she and the mummy came from.’

  ‘… even though heroin had obviously got a lot to do with the dreadful state of that man who was so completely spaced-out in Luston,’ said Crosby censoriously. ‘Peter Caversham.’

  ‘At the mention of whose name Jim Pearson and Nigel Worrow shut up like a pair of Horace Boller’s clams,’ remarked Sloan.

  ‘And as for him…’

  ‘Who? Oh, Horace Boller.’ Detective Inspector Sloan gave an unexpected grin. ‘I dare say we’ll all go to our graves without knowing everything he’s been up to. But, rest assured, Crosby, Customs and Excise have his every movement taped.’

  ‘That’s something, sir.’