Those lonely souls who had never travelled far in love missed this road too.
The midwife was saying something behind her mask now.
Sloan moistened his lips. A man tended to forget that the Ship of Felicity once embarked upon berthed here. He wondered if a woman ever did.
‘Coming up to crowning, Doctor,’ said the midwife more clearly.
So this was what they meant by that.
Love’s majesty wore a crown and this was it.
He found himself taking deep gulps of breath, matching Margaret’s. The French had a word for the pain that husbands suffered … someone had once told him what it was. Couvade. It had had no meaning at the time.
There was a moment not long after that when it crossed Sloan’s mind that being born from Adam’s rib in a deep sleep must be a better way than this …
Once he remembered looking at his watch but it meant nothing now: time didn’t enter this world.
It was Thursday, that was all.
Thursday’s child has far to go.
A sudden scurrying among the professionals told him that this child – Thursday’s child – his child – was making a move.
It was just a little later when, though he didn’t realize it in so many words, Sloan became deeply committed to the Classical Greek School of Midwifery. Had anyone asked him then and there he would have opted for his child springing – like Athena – fully armed from the forehead of Zeus.
Presently that feeling, too, passed when they all – man, woman and child – became submerged in a welter of clinical activity and ordinary human excitement.
Then the man in the mask spoke again. He recognized the voice now. It belonged to Dr Roger Elspin. He said, ‘Inspector Sloan, you have a son.’
It didn’t seem wholly right that the first person to congratulate him should be a furtive little man lurking outside in the maternity ward corridor.
‘What are you doing here, Larky?’ asked Sloan from all the eminence of cloud nine.
‘Same as you, Inspector. Being a father.’
‘I’ll tell the midwife to keep an eye on her watch.’
‘Not on my account. I’m going straight these days,’ insisted Larky Nolson earnestly. ‘Honest.’
‘Honest? You wouldn’t know the meaning of the word, Larky …’ Sloan floated on.
And the second person: a detective-constable with a bandage round his head. But fully dressed now. Sloan seized on him.
‘Come on, Crosby. We know where to go now.’
‘Do we, sir? Which way?’
‘Wansdyke and Darnley’s, of course. Where else did you think?’
There was a little portable radio on George Wansdyke’s desk in his office. It was tuned in to the programme which broadcast snippets of news as they came in and the latest news every hour on the hour. In between news flashes and weather reports a disc jockey played pop record after pop record. There was, however, no one in the office listening to it.
‘He was here a minute ago,’ insisted a mystified secretary. ‘If you’ll just wait I’ll check to see if he’s gone through to the works.’
‘Thank you,’ said Sloan, moving over to Wansdyke’s desk. There was just one memo on it. It was handwritten and was addressed to Bill Benfleet, Public Relations Manager, and was from George Wansdyke, Joint Managing Director. It was marked URGENT and it read:
Subject: Tomorrow’s new product announcement. This is to be cancelled forthwith and all press releases and publicity material recalled at once.
Detective-Inspector Sloan motioned Crosby to collect the memo. ‘We’ll need that,’ he said.
‘Exhibit A,’ commented Crosby. ‘It’s the only one we’ve got.’
‘There’s an empty insulin bottle,’ Sloan reminded him, ‘and some explosive clamped to a car …’
‘And a dead dog,’ added Crosby lugubriously. ‘I’d forgotten Isolde.’
‘A funny mixture, I grant you.’ Sloan frowned. ‘I reckon this memo was meant to be sent as soon as Wansdyke heard news of the explosion and his partner’s death on the radio.’
‘And it didn’t come.’ Crosby grinned. ‘Did it?’
‘We can’t find Mr Wansdyke,’ said the secretary, coming back into the room. ‘I’ve tried Research and Development – he’s often there – and the lab and the moulding shop …’
A telephone rang. She picked it up. ‘When … when? Oh, I see. Thank you … I’ll tell him.’ She put down the receiver. ‘That was the man on the gate. He says Mr Wansdyke left just after you arrived, Inspector, by car.’
‘Which way did he go?’ interrupted Crosby.
‘He says he took the Kinnisport Road …’
‘The hoverport,’ said Sloan quickly. ‘He won’t get far.’
The subsequent road chase made traffic history in the County of Calleshire.
‘I take it,’ said Superintendent Leeyes coldly later that morning, ‘that you are prepared to appease Inspector Harpe. I shall reprimand Constable Crosby myself.’
‘We got our man,’ said Sloan simply. It was the police exegesis.
Crosby’s turn of speed at the wheel had indicated complete recovery from his head injuries. George Wansdyke’s could only point to total guilt. The latter was, however, not saying anything to anyone.
‘Which means,’ declared Leeyes heavily, ‘that you’ll have to do the explaining, Sloan.’
‘It’s easier now that I’ve had a word with Malcolm Darnley,’ admitted Sloan. ‘It was guesswork until then.’
Leeyes waited.
‘It all happened the way it did,’ began Sloan slowly, ‘because Malcolm Darnley had a business trip scheduled to the States.’
‘Go on.’
‘That meant that George Wansdyke couldn’t kill him when he wanted to.’
‘Hard luck,’ said Leeyes vigorously.
‘He just wasn’t there to be killed,’ said Sloan. ‘It all hung on that.’
‘You couldn’t be over-simplifying things, could you?’ enquired the Superintendent sarcastically. ‘Why should Darnley come home and be killed?’
‘Not long before he went off on this trip,’ said Sloan, ‘the firm of Wansdyke and Darnley came up with a discovery …’
‘Not Miss Wansdyke’s do-it-yourself kit for making money out of air?’
‘No. A discovery about plastic – an important one.’
‘Ah, now we’re getting somewhere.’
‘That’s what Malcolm Darnley and George Wansdyke thought – each in his own way.’ Sloan paused. ‘The trouble was that their ways were different ones.’
‘It happens with partners,’ said Leeyes sagely. ‘They don’t always see eye to eye.’
Sloan cleared his throat. ‘That was a bit of an understatement in this case.’
‘Especially marriage partners.’
‘The discovery,’ said Sloan hastily, ‘according to Malcolm Darnley was both socially important and highly marketable.’
‘Bound to be troublesome, then,’ said Leeyes cynically.
‘Not so much a discovery,’ Sloan forged on, ‘as a new process involving a … a …’ he shot a quick glance down at his notebook … ‘a synergist.’
Superintendent Leeyes did not speak. He just looked.
‘It’s like a catalyst but different,’ faltered Sloan. It was no use. You couldn’t bone up on someone else’s trade over the telephone in a few minutes especially when that person had just escaped death by a whisker and naturally wanted to know why. ‘A catalyst,’ he continued in an unusually hortatory manner, ‘causes a reaction but remains unchanged by it.’
‘And a synergist?’ enquired Leeyes silkily.
‘Causes a reaction but is itself changed in the process. It – er – potentiates things.’
‘Like murder?’
‘This … ingredient …’ That was an easier word altogether. He would use it from now on. ‘The ingredient,’ he forged on, ‘used in this new process they’d stumbled on will make some sorts of plastic eventually decay.’
/> ‘Is that good or bad?’ As far as the Superintendent was concerned it was a black and white world.
‘Used plastic is a great problem to society,’ said Sloan, parrot-like. Listening to Malcolm Darnley was infectious. ‘Your old yoghurt carton stands to last longer than the Sphinx …’
‘Well?’
‘With this ingredient built in it would gradually become … er …’ he hesitated before introducing yet another new word … ‘degradable and so decay.’
Leeyes, however, wasn’t thinking about words. ‘This process, Sloan, was worth money?’
‘Big money,’ agreed Sloan tacitly.
‘A quarter of a million pounds’ worth of money?’
‘Precisely, sir.’ He coughed. ‘Exactly, you might say.’
‘What then,’ asked Leeyes simply, ‘was the problem?’
Detective-Inspector Sloan felt a momentary pang of sympathy for George Wansdyke as he tried to explain. ‘Malcolm Darnley was a conservation buff, sir. Mad about preserving the countryside.’
‘We all know that,’ said Leeyes. ‘What about it?’
‘Malcolm Darnley,’ said Sloan impressively, ‘thought that the world should have the process free.’
‘Pro bono publico,’ breathed Leeyes, awestruck, ‘instead of a quarter of a million pounds?’
‘No more plastic cups in the Channel,’ said Sloan, echoing a fanatic. ‘No more cows choking to death on plastic bags left in a field. Less detritus for eternity.’
The Superintendent was considering something quite different – something more in his own line. ‘There are more ways than one of killing the golden goose,’ he said. Smaller rubbish dumps didn’t excite him. Murder did.
‘That’s what Wansdyke thought,’ reported Sloan. The greatest good of the greatest number hadn’t suited George Wansdyke at all. ‘He lost out in the argument with Darnley but he did manage to get him to agree to defer a public announcement until Darnley got back from the States.’
‘His death warrant.’
‘Everything was to stay under wraps until then.’
Leeyes grunted. ‘Breathing space.’
‘He managed that side of things quite well.’
‘Businesses,’ said Leeyes largely, ‘are used to trade secrets.’
‘Wansdyke apparently made quite a thing of insisting that Malcolm Darnley himself should be the one to do the announcing because of his connections with the conservation lobby.’
‘Conservation lobby!’ Leeyes ground his teeth. ‘The man won’t even let us cut off a branch, let alone a tree.’
‘Wansdyke made out that Darnley would make the better splash in the press and so forth.’ Sloan was on sure ground here. Twice he’d seen Bill Benfleet, the firm’s Public Relations man, closeted with a strangely reluctant Wansdyke, trying to get him to pass a press release for publication. ‘No wonder Wansdyke hadn’t wanted to say too much.’
‘Knowing all the time,’ said the Superintendent intelligently, ‘that there wasn’t going to be any disclosing of trade secrets by anybody.’
‘Not if George Wansdyke could help it,’ said Sloan, ‘because he’d gone and sold the process to a big manufacturer while Darnley was away.’
Leeyes whistled. ‘He had, had he?’
‘He was in sole charge while Darnley was abroad,’ said Sloan. ‘There was no problem.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ said Leeyes acidly, ‘that he didn’t know what to do with the money.’
‘In a way,’ replied Sloan. Embarras de richesse was quite often a problem in the criminal world.
‘If Darnley was abroad why couldn’t Wansdyke have just paid it into the firm’s account – he couldn’t very well pretend it wasn’t the firm’s secret, could he?’
‘No, it was the firm’s secret all right. The people who bought it would have checked on that. Wansdyke couldn’t pay it into the firm’s account straightaway because Darnley got weekly sales figures while he was abroad and anyway anyone in the firm might have mentioned it to him in a letter …’ That he also got a cash-flow chart Sloan did not mention. He was a policeman, not an accountant.
‘What was wrong with using his own account in the meantime, then?’
‘He shares it with his wife.’
Leeyes rolled his eyes at man’s monumental folly.
‘He could have opened a special account,’ said Sloan, who had been thinking about this, ‘but that has the definite look of misappropriation. He needed this transaction to seem quite above board.’
‘Clean hands.’
‘Exactly.’
‘With Darnley dead, though,’ Leeyes reminded him.
‘And Beatrice too,’ said Sloan. ‘She knew about the discovery, you see. She spent her weekends in the lab by courtesy of Darnley and she knew enough chemistry to understand what had been discovered.’ He’d told her about their success.’
‘So with Darnley and Beatrice both dead …’
‘And the money back in the firm’s account as soon as possible after that,’ said Sloan.
‘Everything neat and tidy for the auditors – that’s always important in fraud.’ The Superintendent leaned back. ‘Do you know, Sloan, that you can nearly always put people who commit fraud into open prisons? Funny that they should be that sort of trustworthy, isn’t it?’
Sloan kept a grip on his theme. ‘Wansdyke had already begun to write to the firm he’d sold it to enquiring why he hadn’t had their cheque.’
‘Window-dressing,’ said Leeyes succinctly.
‘They would say that they’d sent it to the bank as instructed, and the bank would say they’d been given the right name and account number for Miss B.G. Wansdyke.’
‘And?’
‘George Wansdyke would say right name – B.G. Wansdyke – he’s Bertram George himself, remember – but wrong account number. The money belongs to Wansdyke and Darnley and he can prove quite easily that it does. It was safe enough, of course, in Beatrice’s account while he was sole executor.’
‘Everyone,’ said Leeyes drily, ‘says “Oops, sorry” and blames the typist. And everything in the garden’s lovely again.’
‘Beatrice had to die too because of what she knew. He was just taking advantage of the fact.’ Sloan coughed. ‘We haven’t heard George Wansdyke’s side of things yet, sir.’
‘He’s not only not speaking to the police –’ Leeyes poked at a message sheet on his desk – ‘he won’t see his wife either.’
Sloan clapped his hand to his forehead. ‘Wife! Good Lord, where’s the nearest florist?’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Superintendent Leeyes pompously, ‘I hear that Wansdyke and Darnley aren’t the only ones with a new product announcement, are they?’
‘No, sir.’
Detective-Inspector Sloan had someone else to appease besides Inspector Harpe of Traffic Division.
He said it with flowers at the bedside each day.
Margaret Sloan had a lot of visitors. ‘They’re going to get married after Briony’s taken her Final State,’ she informed him one day.
‘Who is … are?’
‘Dr Elspin and Briony Petforth.’ She smiled dreamily. ‘He’s really very nice.’
‘For a doctor,’ Sloan reminded her.
‘That will give them a little time to save up.’ Margaret Sloan paused. ‘She still gets her aunt’s house, doesn’t she?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Sloan drily. ‘Everything except the quarter of a million pounds goes just where Miss Wansdyke willed it. She only lost out on one thing she wanted.’
‘What was that?’
‘Her wish to be cremated.’ Sloan shifted uncomfortably. Visitors’ chairs in hospitals were not designed for long use. ‘Cremation means two doctors and a lot more questions all round. Wansdyke didn’t want that. He wanted a nice quick death certificate.’
‘He did it, then? Changed the insulin for water?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Sloan. ‘As nice a way to murder as you can find.’
‘Nice?’ she shuddered.
‘Nice legally,’ he said. That meant the police didn’t like it but the lawyers did. ‘The Superintendent thinks they’ll have to go for malice aforethought in a big way.’
Margaret Sloan smoothed the edge of the sheet. ‘And the dog?’
‘He killed that too. He had a key, remember. He didn’t want an Airedale barking when Beatrice drifted off into her coma and it couldn’t get out. Or if anyone called. Wansdyke had invited Briony to his house on Sunday, by the way.’
‘To make sure she didn’t call on her aunt?’
‘That’s right. They could have saved her, you know, almost up until the end.’
Margaret Sloan shuddered again.
Detective-Inspector Sloan recalled himself away from one sort of duty and back to another. ‘How’s my son and heir?’
On his next visit she asked him about Mrs Pauline Wansdyke.
‘Gone back to mother.’
‘Poor woman.’
‘She always thought she’d married beneath her,’ said Sloan, who had had to endure quite a lot of Mrs Pauline Wansdyke lately.
‘It never does to think that,’ said Margaret Sloan sagaciously.
‘All the other Hartley-Powells said so too.’
‘That only makes it worse.’
‘They’ve traced the explosive that was under the car,’ he said soberly.
She shivered. ‘To George Wansdyke?’
‘Without a shadow of doubt.’
Another day she had news of Nicholas Petforth for him gleaned from his sister, Briony.
‘He’s very sorry about it all,’ Margaret Sloan began.
Sloan grunted. He hadn’t a lot of time for young men who hit policemen and said so now with some vigour. ‘And without a reason,’ he added pointedly.
‘When he heard the police were asking after him,’ Margaret Sloan repeated what an anxious Briony had told her, ‘he lost his nerve and left the squat and his job.’
‘Actions speak louder than words,’ observed Sloan.
‘And of course as soon as George Wansdyke knew that somebody was suspicious about something he stirred things up as much as he could in that quarter.’
‘He certainly got Briony worried,’ conceded Sloan.
‘And Nicholas through her,’ said his wife. She paused and adjusted a flower in the vase on her locker. ‘He realizes now,’ said Margaret Sloan, surrogate apologetic for Briony Petforth, ‘that he was only running away.’
Some Die Eloquent Page 19
