She smiled wanly and quoted, ‘“When I grow rich, Say the bells of Shoreditch.”’
‘“The Bells of London Town”,’ he said. Nursery rhymes were uncannily prescient. Then something stirred in his own childhood memory. ‘The Old Bailey comes into that, too, doesn’t it?’
‘“When will you pay me?”’ she sang softly.
‘“Say the bells at Old Bailey”,’ he completed the couplet in a lower register.
‘Trust a copper to remember that bit,’ she said, her turn to tease.
‘Plenty of debts to society have been paid at the Old Bailey in its time.’
‘We shouldn’t be joking about all this, should we?’ she said quickly. ‘Not with Miss Wansdyke and her dog both lying dead.’
Somewhere in one of the books they had had handed out to them at the ante-natal clinic had been some advice about how a couple should comport themselves during the wife’s pregnancy. They shouldn’t move house, for instance, nor indulge in great arguments. Whims, however bizarre, should be indulged. Strange fancies for out-of-season strawberries or fresh oysters should be pandered to. Layettes should be prepared, but – and the good books stressed this – pregnancy was no time for philosophical doubts. The profundities of life should be allowed to take second place to the most profound experience of all living.
He gave a huge yawn and deliberately steered the conversation towards more neutral ground. ‘There’s one funny thing, though, Margaret …’
‘What’s that?’
‘The family have gone all quiet about the main beneficiary, Nicholas Petforth, Briony’s brother. They say they don’t know where he is.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said consideringly, ‘he’ll come home again now that there’s something to come back for.’
‘There! What did I say?’ He gave her an affectionate grin. ‘You’re really as bad as the Superintendent after all.’
‘Me?’ she said indignantly.
‘All he does is concentrate on who gains.’ He stretched his legs out before the blaze in the hearth. ‘At least it means that I know what tomorrow’s first job is going to be.’
She looked up. ‘What’s that?’
‘Find Master Petforth.’
‘Not,’ she enquired ironically, ‘a search and destroy mission – destroy with great wealth, I mean.’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘We’ll just put the word out. That’s all. If he’s in Calleshire, we’ll pick him up tomorrow. If we have to ask questions outside the county, of course it’ll take longer – What is it?’ His whole tone changed suddenly as he saw a spasm of pain crossing her face. ‘Margaret – Margaret, what is it? What’s wrong? Is it …’
‘I’ve just thought … that horrible nursery rhyme.’
‘Oranges and lemons?’
She stared at him. ‘I’ve remembered how it finishes.’
‘Don’t look like that, my love,’ he pleaded. ‘You frightened me. For a moment I thought …’
‘“Here comes a candle to light you to bed”,’ she intoned, ‘“and here comes a chopper to chop off your head.”’
It was Detective-Constable William Edward Crosby who found out where Nicholas Petforth was.
People who went native these days usually did so in one of two ways. They either took to the road or they joined a commune.
Putting the word out in the county had had the desired effect.
They learned down at the Berebury Police Station fairly early on that their man wasn’t on the road in Calleshire. He was too young for that game for a start and those who were walking the countryside – that pathetic group whose worldly possessions were clutched to them, who tramped from somewhere to anywhere like a variety of land-locked Flying Dutchmen, without either anchor or rudder, answering to any wind or to no wind at all – had not come across anyone sounding like Miss Beatrice Wansdyke’s nephew. There were fewer of such travellers about these days but those that there were were conspicuous, and – up hill and down dale – they obligingly stopped long enough to tell the police that Nicholas Petforth wasn’t one of their number. Mind you, stopping wasn’t something they liked to do. If you stopped, you had to think: and for them thinking was the only unbearable activity.
Today’s drop-outs didn’t walk the countryside. When they wanted to cast off Society’s links they squatted: especially the younger ones. If enough of them squatted together, somehow the community became a commune.
It had fallen to Detective-Constable Crosby’s lot to call on the one in the town of Luston.
‘You can’t miss it, lad,’ the friendly station sergeant at Luston had told him, adding, ‘I dare say there’ll be a bite left to eat in our canteen when you get back.’ He chuckled. ‘If you still feel like eating, that is.’
Any connection between what went on in this Calleshire commune and the dreams and the reality of the days of the French Commune of an earlier age must have been purely coincidental. Urban decay had reached the old centre of the industrial town: urban renewal hadn’t. Constable Crosby made his way to a faded early-nineteenth-century town house that in its prime had had some considerable style to it. Now its paintwork was peeling and some of its windows were boarded up. Other windows sported blankets doing duty as curtains. Somehow, though, the once-graceful building had contrived to retain an air of decayed gentility – distinction, even.
Detective-Constable Crosby’s pounding on the front door shook it visibly but produced no answer from within. Immediately, however, the door of the house next door flew open and a raven-haired woman put her head out.
‘If you’re the gas,’ she said, ‘you’re wasting your time. It’s cut off.’
Crosby said he wasn’t the gas.
‘They’ve found a way round the electricity meter for sure,’ she said.
Crosby said he could well believe it.
‘And if you’re the Water Board,’ she grimaced, completing a trinity of public supply undertaking, ‘you needn’t worry. They don’t use it.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘The whole place stinks.’
By now Crosby had been able to appreciate this fact for himself. Château Commune certainly had a bouquet all its own.
‘I can tell you one thing for sure,’ she cackled. ‘They can’t read bills in there.’
‘Some people have all the luck,’ said Crosby.
The neighbour’s head, which seemed as disembodied behind its owner’s front door as the Cheshire Cat’s on its wall, looked him up and down.
‘Come to serve a summons,’ ave you?’ she asked shrewdly.
In a way it was a tribute to his manner, if not his suit.
‘I’m making enquiries,’ responded Crosby.
‘You’ll be lucky,’ she sniffed. She jerked her head towards the other house. ‘Not many of them get up in the mornings, I can tell you.’
He looked up at the blind windows.
‘Work’s a dirty word with that lot,’ she said.
‘Some of them must do some,’ protested the young policeman in spite of himself. They’d been very firm in his primary school about tying the male image to the work ethic. The boys hadn’t learned knitting. They’d been taught instead that men must work. The corollary that women must weep (“Georgie Porgy, kissed the girls and made them cry”) they’d been left to find out for themselves in the playground afterwards. ‘You can’t live without working,’ he said, though you couldn’t be a policeman long without meeting a group who tried to do just that.
‘Two or three of the fellers do go out to work,’ she conceded. ‘None of the girls.’ She raised her eyebrows heavenwards. ‘What they do all day long don’t bear thinking about.’
It was quite apparent, though, from her keen expression that she thought about it a lot.
Crosby kept silent.
She jerked her head towards the next-door building. ‘Beats me,’ she said, sucking her teeth, ‘how the police let them get away with squatting.’
Crosby drew breath. ‘Civil law …’
‘Take Fred Smith’s boy
down the road.’
‘Well?’
‘They had him for breaking and entering last week.’
‘Did they?’
‘Camera shop in Calleford High Street.’
‘Ah.’
‘Don’t you go and say that that’s different’
‘I shan’t.’
‘This lot next door,’ she said richly, ‘did their breaking and entering and they stayed.’
‘I can see that.’
‘And nobody’s touched them for anything.’
‘No.’ It was funny how the word ‘touched’ hung about the law.
‘It’s not right.’
‘No, madam.’ If anything, squatting offended the police even more than it did the public. ‘But the law is that –’
‘You looking for anyone in particular?’ she interrupted him off-handedly.
‘Tall, youngish lad,’ said Crosby, also cutting the cackle and getting to the horses. ‘Auburn hair. Still a bit freckled.’
‘There’s one or two of ’em in there,’ she said slyly, ‘that shouldn’t be.’
‘I dare say. This chap …’
She jerked her head. ‘And not what you’d expect, either.’
‘Oh?’
‘A couple of clever dicks and some girls who should know better.’
‘From good homes, you mean?’ he said naïvely.
Her face assumed a curious expression. ‘If that’s what you’d call Calle Castle …’
‘The Duke’s daughter?’ Crosby took another look up at the dilapidated house.
‘His youngest.’ She sniffed.
‘Bit of a change, wasn’t it?’
‘I should think they had their hands full with her at home. She’s a one, all right. Oh, her father came round and made noises.’
‘I’ll bet.’
‘It didn’t do any good. It was her mother that got her out.’
‘How?’ asked Crosby in spite of himself.
‘Sent the chauffeur round each week with a box of groceries and a brace of pheasants.’
‘How did that do it?’
The face grinned at his innocence. ‘The Lady Alicia was all for sending them back, snooty-like, unopened.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘Said it made her feel different.’
‘I’ll bet it did,’ said Crosby warmly
‘But the others wouldn’t let her,’ cackled the woman shrewishly. ‘They ate ’em.’
‘Too bad. Then she grew up or something?’
‘After a bit,’ she crowed, ‘she got to see the others were making a fool of her.’
‘Sponging,’ pronounced Crosby.
‘Enjoying what they said they despised,’ mimicked the woman in high ladylike tones. She grinned. ‘Give her another ten years and she’ll be opening flower shows with the best of them.’
‘This fellow that I’m looking for …’
‘Called Nick?’ hazarded the woman.
‘Could be.’
‘You’re wasting your time.’
‘Not here?’
‘One of the workers. Goes off early.’
‘Where?’
‘Up the motorway site.’
‘Thanks.’ Crosby turned to go. Then he stopped. ‘You’d miss them now, wouldn’t you?’ he said.
She slammed the door.
‘The bank,’ reported Sloan gloomily, ‘will surrender details of their late client’s account if …’
‘Yes?’ said Superintendent Leeyes eagerly, leaning forward across his desk.
‘If,’ repeated Sloan, ‘we get a court order.’
‘Bah!’ said Leeyes, who never in any circumstances whatsoever himself divulged confidential police information to any other unauthorized person or institution.
‘And not without one,’ underlined Sloan.
‘Obstructionists …’
‘Any other assistance that we may require,’ repeated Sloan fluently, ‘they will, of course, be only too happy to give us.’
‘The source of the money,’ said Leeyes promptly.
‘I asked them that,’ said Sloan.
‘Well?’
‘They said “What money?” as bland as butter.’
‘What about her lifestyle?’ said Leeyes in a challenging fashion. ‘That didn’t go with a quarter of a million pounds, did it?’
‘That,’ admitted Sloan, ‘did seem to strike a chord with the bank manager.’
‘Well,’ said Leeyes tartly, ‘she wasn’t exactly living it up, was she?’
‘It’s not,’ ventured Sloan cautiously, ‘quite the same down there at the bank as it is round here moneywise.’
‘I should hope not,’ retorted Leeyes speedily. There was a pause. Then he said, ‘Just exactly what are you getting at, Sloan?’
‘Down there, sir, they’re more used than we are here to folks without money spending it.’
‘Drinking whisky on a beer income,’ said Leeyes graphically.
‘And to customers with it not spending it,’ added Sloan fairly.
‘Orange juice on a brandy income.’
‘I understand,’ replied Sloan drily, ‘that they’ve got a fair number of those too.’
Shaking his head at what he saw as a waste of natural resources, Leeyes said, ‘Anything else?’
‘Every time I came up with a question they referred me to their client’s executor.’
‘Bertram George Wansdyke,’ said the Superintendent, who always did his homework.
‘He doesn’t use the Bertram,’ Sloan informed him. ‘They told me that at the bank.’
‘Don’t blame him.’
‘He’s always known as George.’
‘Never Bertram,’ noted Leeyes. ‘People can be funny about Christian names.’
‘Watch out for any man who calls his son Samson,’ said Sloan.
‘You and your wife got all that sort of thing lined up all right, Sloan?’ asked Leeyes gruffly.
‘What? Oh yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’ Potential names of babies were not in short supply in the Sloan ménage. On the contrary. And had they been, Sloan’s mother had a reserve supply.
‘Mind you,’ said the Superintendent reminiscently, ‘our Brigadier was called Cecil so it doesn’t always signify.’
‘I was once attacked by a social misfit called Algernon,’ contributed Sloan. The Superintendent had to be diverted from recounting his wartime experiences at all costs or the day was lost. ‘At least, his mother called him Algernon and the judge called him a social misfit and I –’
‘This Bertram George Wansdyke …’
‘A partner in Wansdyke and Darnley.’
‘The firm down by the bridge?’
‘Them. Plastics manufacturers.’
‘Anything,’ enquired Leeyes, rolling his eyes, ‘to do with the celebrated Malcolm Darnley?’
‘Everything.’
‘Good God! The agitator?’
‘Conservationist,’ murmured Sloan mildly, ‘is what he calls himself.’
‘He’s practically maniacal about it.’
‘Dedicated,’ said Sloan austerely, ‘is the word the newspapers use.’
‘Inspector Harpe can’t get a roadway corner in the whole of Calleshire straightened,’ declared Leeyes. ‘Every time he wants a tree down it turns out to have a preservation order clapped on it.’
‘That’s Malcolm Darnley,’ agreed Sloan. ‘He insists that trees do not get up and hit passing motorists. He wins every time.’
‘And the Town Council can’t widen the roads round by the cattle market either. Every building they want out of the way turns out to have had Queen Elizabeth sleeping in it or something.’
‘Listed,’ said Sloan more technically.
‘And I have to have two good men and true down there every market day when they should be catching villains.’
‘His mission in life,’ Sloan quoted something he’d read in the local newspaper, ‘is the preservation of the environment.’
‘The man’s a
first-class nuisance.’
‘Public-spirited,’ murmured Sloan, ‘is the name of the game.’
‘Hrrrrrmph.’
‘Anyway George Wansdyke seems able to cope.’
‘Firm all right?’
‘Appears to be flourishing,’ said Sloan. ‘They turn out the more rarefied plastic parts for industry and medicine and so forth. They do a lot of the research and development, too, I’m told. Take on promising young science graduates and all that sort of thing.’
‘No word of any money troubles?’
‘None.’ He coughed. ‘Anyway, George Wansdyke doesn’t get anything himself from his aunt’s estate. His children get an eighth between them in trust, that’s all.’
‘George Wansdyke,’ pronounced Superintendent Leeyes didactically, ‘is the sole executor of an estate that everyone believes to be small –’
They were interrupted by the telephone.
‘Who?’ said Leeyes testily. ‘Well, put him through, of course.’ He looked at Sloan. ‘It’s Dr Dabbe.’ His tone changed. ‘Good morning, Doctor. About Beatrice Gwendoline Wansdyke … yes … yes, yes … I know all the background … yes … diabetes … insulin … what’s that?’ His eyebrows disappeared upwards. ‘What did you say?… Yes, I’ve got that … insulin … no insulin? Do you mind repeating that? Yes, that’s what I thought you said. I’ll send a man round for the report straightaway … Thank you.’ He made to put the telephone receiver down, then changed his mind. ‘Doctor, are you still there?… Look here, how are you on dogs?… What?… No, not betting on them, doing post mortems on them … on one, actually … we may want one doing … That’s very kind of you. Thank you.’ He did put the telephone down this time. And then he turned back to Sloan, his face a study. ‘The pathologist reports that there was no trace of insulin in Beatrice Wansdyke’s blood. He reckons she’s been without it for several days.’
CHAPTER VIII
My face is wan and wears a leaden look;
If you try science you’ll be brought to book.
The foreman on the motorway construction site was a much-tried man. He had, however, long ago reached that stage of controlled despair when he regarded each fresh burden with a certain masochistic satisfaction as providing further evidence of a malign fate’s continued unkindness to him.
Some Die Eloquent Page 7
