She nodded, still clutching the face mask.
When the pain had passed she removed it and asked, ‘Is my husband back yet?’
‘Not yet,’ said the midwife, adding with uncanny – but quite unwitting – prescience, ‘I expect he’s been held up somewhere.’
Detective-Inspector Sloan, father-to-be, swung back to the side of the stairs and out of the direct line of whoever was above. He transferred his torch to his left hand, keeping his right free. The voice had been a youngish one. He decided to provoke it into speech again. He tapped the side of the banister rail with the handle of his torch.
‘Don’t move,’ said the voice at once.
Sloan did move. Noisily.
‘Don’t move, I said,’ came the voice again. Less assuredly this time.
Sloan stepped round in front of the staircase again. There was a certain amount of thin light coming from an uncurtained window near the landing at the top of the stairs. When he got round far enough to see up in that direction, though, he was disappointed. All he could make out was a shape standing in a position of vantage at the head of the stairs.
He paused for thought.
There was no chance of rushing someone standing eight feet above ground level. He knew that. Especially with stairs only wide enough for one person at a time. Builders of medieval castles had known what they were about when they designed their tiny turret staircases inside their towers. One man with a sword standing at the top of one of these could keep an army at bay. Besides, he, Christopher Dennis Sloan, Detective-Inspector, who should know better, had committed the cardinal sin of coming here alone, and without leaving word of what he was about.
So if he failed there would be bureaucratic trouble. Going it alone was only countenanced in the police force when married to success. Hunches could be played by police officers all right – but they had to be winning hunches.
Or else.
Very cautiously he advanced and put his foot on the bottom step of the staircase.
It creaked.
It would.
The figure at the top of the stairs promptly took a step downwards. Sloan could see now that the man’s right hand had something in it. It could have been a poker. He decided on a change of tactics.
‘Suppose,’ said Sloan amiably, ‘you tell me your name.’
This arrested the descent.
‘Suppose,’ countered the voice at the top of the stairs, ‘you tell me yours.’
‘Police,’ said Sloan.
A short laugh came from above. ‘I thought it was either cops or robbers and the silver’s not worth stealing.’
‘Your name,’ said Sloan again. The Superintendent was a great believer in maintaining the initiative and it rubbed off.
‘Legion,’ said the voice promptly.
‘I think,’ said Sloan quietly, ‘that it’s Nicholas Petforth.’
‘And if it is?’ challenged the voice.
‘Then we’ve been looking for you.’
‘We seek him here,’ came mockingly out of the darkness, ‘we seek him there.’
‘You’re wanted for questioning,’ said Sloan more prosaically.
‘I didn’t think it was for a dog licence.’
‘No,’ said Sloan, ‘it wasn’t.’ The beginnings of an idea had come to him.
‘Coming for me at the squat and then hounding me at work.’
‘The hospital,’ Sloan reminded him. In the dim light he was trying to count the number of stairs.
‘There, too,’ said the voice with a distinct note of grievance.
‘You led us a real dance half-way round the hospital.’
‘I’ve probably caught the dreaded lurgies all because of you.’
‘That’s why you went up to Fleming Ward afterwards to see your sister, isn’t it?’ He thought there were eleven steps in the staircase.
‘She’s a nurse,’ mumbled the voice. ‘I thought she’d know.’
‘Got any symptoms yet?’ enquired Sloan heartlessly. With sybilline cunning he put his foot on the second stair up from the hall at the same moment as he spoke.
‘No.’
‘Not gone green all over or anything like that, have you?’ The great thing now, decided Sloan, was to maintain the dialogue.
‘No,’ said the figure at the top of the stairs, ‘and I’m not going to turn into a toad either just for Malcolm Darnley’s benefit.
‘Come again?’ said Sloan. Maintaining a dialogue with the man above wasn’t as difficult as it might have been: but it was unexpected.
‘Malcolm Darnley,’ said the voice above richly, ‘has set up a group to help toads across this new motorway.’
‘It’s in their way, too, is it?’ said Sloan, unsurprised. He felt for the third step with his foot.
‘Cuts right across their patch.’
‘Pity, that.’ Sloan was really taking a second look at the landing window. If he attempted to advance in an upright position he would be silhouetted against what little light there was. There would have to be a better way up. He dropped to his knees. The stair he was on creaked as he did so.
‘Don’t come any further,’ said the voice hoarsely.
‘If,’ said Sloan with the utmost cordiality, ‘you’re not going to turn into a toad, what about being a prince?’
‘A prince?’ The remark seemed to have caught its hearer off balance.
‘Seems as if it’s always one or the other,’ said Sloan, ‘in all the best fairy stories.’ He was working his way up the stairs on his knees now. Like the pilgrims did when they climbed the Penitential Steps in Rome.
‘Not even to please a fairy princess,’ replied the voice. Its owner sounded really quite young.
Sloan had to keep silent now. Speech would have betrayed how near to his quarry he was. In fact his only problem was how to keep his breathing under control: it had to be soundless.
‘Besides,’ said the voice, ‘I think I’d rather be a toad.’
As Detective-Inspector Sloan tensed himself in preparation for a grab at the ankles of the man standing above he remembered something else about toads: that there was a variety of the species called the midwife toad.
It lent a lot of power to his elbow.
In a different place and for a different reason someone else had also been trying hard to control her breathing.
Trying harder.
Or perhaps it was just more difficult.
‘Don’t hold your breath,’ adjured the midwife.
Mrs Sloan thought briefly about a suitable retort but didn’t make it.
Breath was too precious now to be wasted on words.
Besides, words were magnificently irrelevant.
True, she was making a sound of some sort but in a way altogether dissociated from what she was actually thinking. It might have been coming from someone else, so little control had she over it.
‘And remember to rest in between pains,’ continued the person in charge in an admonitory manner.
Being in charge, decided Margaret Sloan to herself in a detached fashion, was an illusion. Anyone who thought they were in control of events in a delivery ward was living in cloud-cuckoo-land. Events were in control of everyone else. An event, anyway. She took a breath of shuddering proportions, and decided that anyone who wasn’t the mother or the baby at a confinement was only on the touchline.
Not part of the real action at all.
It was a moment or two before she realized that her immediate world now consisted of more than herself, the midwife and a gas and air machine. Aware that someone else was standing beside her bed, she turned her head with an effort and consciously tried to focus her gaze on the figure.
Detective-Inspector Sloan moistened his lips uneasily. ‘Sorry I’m a bit late …’
Any husband to any wife.
‘Where have you been?’ she asked.
Any wife to any husband, as the poet said.
CHAPTER XVII
What about merchants? Lord! They don’t maintain
A fixed prosperity, believe you me.
He did set out to tell her where he’d been.
‘Nick Petforth’s safely in a cell now,’ he said.
He couldn’t tell if she was listening to him or not.
‘And a bit worse for wear, I must say.’
Or even if she wanted to hear.
‘The station sergeant,’ he plunged on, ‘didn’t like the look of him at all when I took him in.’
He had begun by patting her hand, then holding it.
‘I told him that he’d fallen down a flight of stairs in the course of arrest, which was true in a manner of speaking.’
Margaret Sloan’s eyes were closed. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
‘And he said,’ Sloan told her, ‘that he’d heard that one before and I could tell it to the Marines if I wanted to but that the Court wouldn’t like it.’
Margaret Sloan made no response but she left her hand in his.
Sloan carried gallantly on. ‘He asked me what I was charging him with. Hitting Crosby, I said. Do you know what he said to that?’
The hand that lay in his tightened but still Margaret Sloan did not speak.
‘No?’ Sloan grinned. ‘You won’t believe this, Margaret, but he sighed deeply – the station sergeant of all people and you know how strait-laced he is – he sighed and said, “Inspector Sloan, you don’t know how I envy him. Hitting Crosby is something I’ve wanted to do myself for a long time.”’
Had there been a faint twitch at the edge of Margaret Sloan’s lips or had he imagined it?
‘Almost worth going on a charge for, he said it would have been.’
Margaret Sloan said nothing.
‘I know the feeling,’ said Sloan more to himself than to her.
After that Sloan, too, fell silent and presently the hand that held his slackened its tension and dropped away.
‘She’s asleep,’ pronounced a figure in blue over his shoulder. ‘We gave her something. You can go away again for a little while. Not too long, mind …’
Sloan looked at his watch. Morning was breaking and the hospital was coming to life again for a new day. He would go to Fleming Ward and visit someone else.
Detective-Constable Crosby, tousled hair extruding between layers of bandage, struggled to sit up as Sloan approached his bed. ‘Morning, sir.’
‘How went the night?’
‘No sign of Nick Petforth,’ said Crosby, ‘and his sister went off duty at supper-time.’
‘He’s in a cell,’ said Sloan.
‘Ah.’ Crosby sank back on his pillows.
‘But I don’t think he did more than hit you.’
‘That’s enough, isn’t it?’ demanded the victim, immediately aggrieved. ‘It hurt.’
Sloan looked at the detective-constable’s bandaged head with a new dispassion. A spell in the delivery room of the maternity ward altered a man’s outlook on pain.
‘Besides,’ said the patient, ‘I didn’t get a wink of sleep last night.’
‘He’s admitted hitting you and denied everything else,’ said Sloan succinctly.
‘You can’t sleep in a place like this even without a headache,’ said Crosby, preoccupied as any other invalid with his own state of health.
Sloan wondered what Superintendent Leeyes would have said to that and then to his surprise heard himself saying it aloud. He must be getting old. ‘I don’t know what the Force is coming to.’
‘Petforth’s got the best motive,’ said Crosby, reluctantly abandoning the role of valetudinarian.
‘The biggest, you mean,’ said Sloan.
‘Half the deceased’s estate.’ Crosby thought for a moment. ‘And he’d got the means, too, hadn’t he, sir?’
‘Had he?’ asked Sloan.
‘If there weren’t half a dozen hypodermic syringes sculling around that squat I’ll eat my hat.’
Sloan nodded. He could believe that half of that lot were on those sorts of drugs.
‘And,’ insisted Crosby, ‘he’d got the opportunity. Ah, good …’ His face brightened. ‘There’s the tea trolley. I thought they were never coming with it.’
‘By opportunity,’ continued Sloan, smiling winningly at the nurse in charge of the teapot, ‘I suppose you mean that he had a key to Beatrice Wansdyke’s house?’
‘I do,’ Crosby grimaced. ‘The tea’s even worse here than at the station.’
‘Never.’
‘Got bicarbonate of soda in it, I expect.’
‘Whatever for?’ said Sloan, startled. He didn’t want to be done good to by any hospital so early in the day.
‘To make it look darker and go further, of course.’
Sloan’s mother had never stooped to such tactics. He promptly went off the tea.
Crosby leant back against his pillows with the air of one winding up a case. ‘There you are, sir. Motive, means and opportunity – what more do you want?’
‘Proof,’ said Sloan: but it wasn’t what he meant.
‘Ah.’ Crosby smoothed down the sheet.
‘No,’ said Sloan, immediately amending what he had said, ‘that’s not true. What I really want to know is exactly where all that money came from and what it was doing sitting in the account of the late Miss B.G. Wansdyke.’ He paused. Somewhere at the back of his mind then something had rung a little bell. He searched his memory but Mnemosyne, daughter of Heaven, mother of the Muses, sat back and answer came there none. ‘And, Crosby,’ he added in the absence of elucidation, ‘I want to know exactly what the hurry was.’
‘What hurry?’ asked Crosby, lending a nice touch of verisimilitude to his remark by lying back negligently in his bed, ostentatiously remote from the pace of life at the police station.
‘The hurry about her dying when she did.’ Sloan regarded the constable straightly: hospital cut a man off from the world so. ‘We’ll have to get you out of here, Crosby, before the rot sets in.’
‘I can’t see why it was an against-the-clock job, sir.’
‘I can,’ said Sloan briskly. ‘You see, if by any chance it wasn’t her money and she didn’t know about it either …’
‘If’, said Crosby.
‘Then she stood to find out about it pretty soon, didn’t she?’
‘How?’
‘When she got her next bank statement, of course. That hit on your head didn’t damage your brain, did it?’
‘And,’ said Crosby with dignity, ‘the bank statements are due out again at the end of this week.’
‘Or the beginning of next. You can never be sure with a computer.’
‘More tea?’ enquired a new voice.
‘What’s that? Oh, no thank you, Nurse … I must be going soon,’ said Sloan, withdrawing his cup.
‘Suppose, though,’ advanced Crosby cautiously, ‘she had got her bank statement or happened to enquire about the balance at the bank?’
‘Keep supposing,’ said Sloan. ‘Suppose for the sake of argument she’s an honest woman.’ Usually, down at the police station, their suppositions were based the other way round.
‘She sees that there’s something wrong,’ said Crosby, ‘when there’s that sort of money standing to her credit.’
‘And what would she do then?’
‘Tell other people about it?’ hazarded Crosby. ‘Tell the bank anyway, pronto.’
‘Somebody,’ said Sloan profoundly, ‘didn’t want her to do that. They killed her instead.’
‘It doesn’t get them very far, does it?’ objected Crosby. ‘George Wansdyke would find out soon enough when he began to wind her affairs up.’
‘Time,’ said Sloan. ‘They might only have been buying time.’ As a sounding-board there was no doubt that Crosby lacked something. ‘Wansdyke’s pretty busy, what with being in sole charge while his partner’s away and a – what did they call it? – a new product launching on hand.’
‘Talking of time,’ said Crosby helpfully, ‘it’s always opening time for Dr Peter McCavity. And, sir, we don’t k
now how badly Nurse Petforth wants to get married, do we?’
‘Or how much any of the others needed their share,’ conceded Sloan, adding, ‘if the money was really Beatrice Wansdyke’s to leave.’ There was definitely something in the way of thought burgeoning at the back of his mind now. ‘There’s always the possibility that she might have found what she was looking for.’ Air into money: it was a nice thought.
‘If time came into it,’ said Crosby a little truculently, ‘it would be because something was going to happen, wouldn’t it?’ He smoothed the bedclothes in front of him. ‘Well, nothing’s happened so far, sir, has it, and there’s nothing due to happen either, is there?’
‘Not that we know about,’ temporized Sloan. He cast his mind over the Wansdyke legatees. Nothing important appeared to be pending. ‘We don’t know everything, of course.’
‘It’s a bit hard,’ observed the detective-constable, following a different tack, ‘if she’s got to die just to stop her beetling round to her bank manager to tell him that somebody’s turned over two pages or something …’
‘Doesn’t make sense, does it?’ agreed Sloan absently.
‘I wonder where the quarter of a million pounds did come from?’
Sloan nodded. ‘Me, too.’
‘Someone must use that sort of money,’ said the constable. ‘Business, I suppose.’
‘If the money wasn’t lost, stolen or strayed,’ assented Sloan, ‘that’s pretty well all that’s left.’ The dog had died, too; he mustn’t forget that.
‘Big business,’ said Crosby comfortably. There was less than five pounds in the locker by his bed.
Detective Inspector Sloan stood up, ready to go back to the maternity ward. ‘Business. We’ll have to look into …’ His voice faded to a standstill. ‘Say that again, Crosby,’ he commanded, an entirely different tone in his voice.
‘Business,’ said Crosby. ‘Big business.’
‘We were talking about something that might be due to happen, weren’t we?’ he said, suppressing a rising excitement.
‘Nothing that we could think of,’ Crosby reminded him.
‘Oh yes, Crosby, there is something due to happen.’
‘Sir?’
‘On Friday morning,’
‘Friday?’ Crosby looked up. ‘Tomorrow?’
‘As ever was.’ Sloan had a memory of not one but two occasions when a desperate public relations man had been chasing a managing director about a press release. ‘Beatrice Wansdyke didn’t die because of a clerical error,’ he breathed with new-found conviction.
Some Die Eloquent Page 17
