1 The Museum Mystery

by John Waddington-Feather

  Blake Hartley realised he’d thrown down the gauntlet when he’d angered Listerton. As a priest he knew that anger opens chinks in people’s armour. Hartley sensed he’d prised open a chink.

  As a result the inspector was in the firing line the moment he set foot in the station the next day. He’d barely had a chance to tell his sergeant what had happened, when the phone rang. Donaldson was on the other end and his bark reverberated round the office.

  He wanted to see Hartley at once. Hartley had to drop whatever he was doing and get up there at the double. The Chief Constable had been on the phone and was livid. So was Donaldson.

  When he was angry, the Super swelled visibly. He was a small man. So small, Hartley often wondered how he’d got into the force. Wondered more how such a little twerp had come so far in so short a time. It had taken Blake Hartley a lifetime to make the rank of inspector. But then he hadn’t been to university. Nor was his dad a bishop and a leading freemason.

  Donaldson had been the youngest superintendent in the force when he’d arrived at Keighworth some years before, thinking it but a stepping stone to higher things. But there he’d stuck - and he blamed his lack of promotion on Hartley fair and square. Admittedly, the inspector had got himself into some tricky situations, and though he’d always got himself out of them - and earned the thanks of a grateful public in the process - somehow the powers-that-be had never taken to him. Worse still, their dislike for him had rubbed off on Donaldson no matter how much he tried to distance himself. And the harder Donaldson bootlicked for promotion, the longer he seemed set to remain in Keighworth. Superintendent Arthur Donaldson regretted bitterly ever coming to the outlandish place.

  Like he said, he held Hartley responsible. His inspector was stubborn. He made gaffes. He trod on socially sensitive toes. He bent rules. But the most galling thing that stuck in Donaldson’s craw was that he solved crimes.

  Once Hartley was on a case he never let go. No matter whom he offended or how many rules he broke, he never let go. As a result, Donaldson was for ever apologising, for ever smoothing ruffled feathers, for ever carrying cans. And at the end of the day, it was Donaldson’s reputation that suffered not his inspector’s.

  By the time Hartley had climbed the steps to his office, Donaldson looked like a rampant cockerel. He was red in the face and his double-chins shook like wattles.

  Hartley hadn’t time to close the door before the Super fired off. “I told you! I distinctly told you, Hartley, to show respect last night! And what did you do? You went out of your way to insult Sir Jeremy. He kept on about your rudeness all the way through dinner to the Chief Constable. You really got up his nose, Hartley!”

  Superintendent Donaldson paused for breath, glaring across his desk. What riled him more was Hartley’s expression. He stood unmoved, oxlike, deadpan, offering no apology.

  “There’s a limit to how far you can go, Hartley, and, by God, you’ve reached it this time! Your head’s all set to roll, believe me. Sir William will see to that!”

  Inspector Hartley let him rant. He’d heard it all before. The longer he let him rave, the sooner he deflated and shut up. Having fired his second salvo, Donaldson paused again. Hartley still said nothing.

  The Super could never remain silent long. “Well?” he said at length. “Have you nothing to say? You knew exactly what you were doing. I could tell that from the start. You ruined my entire evening.”

  “I’m sorry about that, sir. You seemed to be enjoying yourself so much,” began Hartley.

  “That was before Sir Jeremy met you!” snorted Donaldson.

  “I only said that Sir Jeremy had made a lot of money - some of it very questionably…” tried Hartley again.

  “That’s not for simple coppers like us to decide,” said Donaldson. “That’s for politicians to sort out. We’re here to uphold the law.”

  “Exactly,” said Hartley. “And in the process maintain standards of morality, which seem singularly lacking in some quarters right now.”

  He met his superintendent’s eye. Arthur Donaldson fidgeted with the fobs on his watch-chain. He looked subdued.

  “You always play that card, don’t you, Hartley? You always have to let me know you’re a man of the cloth. Lots of superiors wouldn’t take it. Just because I’m a Reader and churchwarden, you think you can preach to me when it comes to morality. Well, it won’t wear, Hartley. There’s little we coppers can do about folks’ morality. We have to leave it to their consciences. It’s only when they break the law we come into the equation.”

  Hartley had an answer but he checked himself. If Donaldson pulled rank, he pulled the priest.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he said meekly. “I realise now I shouldn’t have put you in that position.”

  When Hartley apologised it threw Donaldson more than his silence.

  “And another thing,” said the Super, feeling more confident, “Whitcliff’s putting his oar in didn’t help either. He was sitting next to Sir Jeremy all night. He told Sir Jeremy and the Chief Constable all about you and that foreigner snooping round the family graveyard at Pithom Hall.”

  “Mausoleum,” corrected Hartley.

  “Let’s not nit-pick, Hartley. You’d no authority to be there - and what’s more to the point you never informed me. All I could do was apologise yet again. Whitcliff said he’d take legal action if you so much as put a foot inside his property again without his permission. Said he’d have us for harassment. He wanted to know all about Waheeb and all I could say was that he was some foreign friend you’d picked up. I told him you were always hobnobbing with foreigners.”

  “We said we were interested in the unusual architecture, that’s all. But I can’t see why they’ve got that place wired up like Fort Knox if they haven’t got something to hide. And you know what we found there later. I told you all about that. I hope, sir, you didn’t say anything to Mr Whitcliff.”

  It was Donaldson’s turn to go on the defensive. He gave Hartley a guilty look and grunted.

  “I didn’t break Waheeb’s cover if that’s what you’re thinking, Hartley,” he said.

  “I didn’t think that for one moment, sir,” said the inspector, pursing his lips and regarding the other closely.

  By now the Super had wound down. He’d had enough. Hartley had somehow made him feel guilty. He couldn’t say how, but he did. He dismissed Hartley with a parting shot.

  “You and Waheeb, steer clear of that place and anything else to do with Whitcliff. He’s not good news. In fact, he’s a very nasty piece of work. Not my type at all. But he has clout and I don’t want his nastiness rubbing off on us. Understand, Hartley?”

  “Of course, sir. Perfectly,” said Hartley and left the office.

  When he’d gone, Superintendent Donaldson looked in the mirror on the wall opposite and smoothed his hair, before adjusting his tie. He was satisfied that he’d taken Hartley down a peg and that always made him feel good. Yet he’d a gut-feeling his inspector was onto something he was keeping to himself and that worried him. When Hartley went his own way, there was trouble in store.

  For his part, Hartley knew he had to act quick. The shipment of arms, together with the coffin, was to be transported to Hull within the week. Once it left there it was out of his hands. Colonel Waheeb had already alerted Interpol, who were tailing the cargo through Europe to the Middle East. They were interested in the arms. Hartley wanted the coffin and its contents. He wanted them desperately. Without them his case was lost.

  He spoke about his dilemma over dinner that night with Sergeant Khan and his wife Semina. She suggested they switch the coffin bonded in Leeds with the fake in the museum. “Nobody’ll know it’s been switched till it’s opened in Cairo and by then, Colonel Waheeb will be ready to pounce,” she said.

  Hartley put down the cup he’d been drinking from. He smiled broadly “Trust a woman to think of that,” he said. “The answer was staring us in the face, but it needed female commonsense to spell it out. We’ll get the dummy mummy fi
rst thing tomorrow, Khan, and drive down to Leeds.”

  “How are you going to get into the warehouse?” asked his wife, Mary.

  “Our Arthur may have friends in high places, but lesser beings like us make contacts on the ground,” he said. “It just so happens that security at the Leeds Wharf is run by an ex-copper who was on the beat with me years ago, Tommy Barnet. He left the force to go into private security when it first started. Sensible chap. He’s a director now of Natsec, which just happens to be the security outfit at Leeds Wharf. Listerton has his stuff there. We’ll be in and out like a flash if I know Tommy Barnet. Nobody will know we’ve even looked at the place.”

  Blake Hartley sipped his coffee thoughtfully. After eating humble pie in Donaldson’s office, he was going to relish recovering that coffin…but not what he knew was in it.

  They left at dusk the next day for Leeds, Khan driving his father-in-law’s pick-up. In the back was the dummy mummy. The weather was damp and raw. A typical Pennine early winter. Khan had to keep the wipers going all the way to Leeds to clear his windscreen of steady drizzle. Anyone outside would be soaked to the skin.

  “How do you survive this awful weather?” asked Colonel Waheeb who looked grey and miserable.

  “Oh, it sort of grows on you,” said Hartley. “If you’re born and bred here, you take it for granted. But, I must admit, it’s nice to get away and see the sun at times.”

  Waheeb grunted. He hadn’t see the sun for days. The weather put the dampers on their conversation. Little was said all the way to Leeds, where the weather if anything was fouler.

  They drove through Shipley, then climbed to Calverley. The houses looked grimmer each mile and there was no let up. The road all the way to Leeds was flanked with rows of houses hemming them in like the mist. Little was left of the hill farms which had once stood there, except a few soggy fields where a handfuls of sodden ponies hugged the broken walls. Who rode them, goodness only knows. And where they rode was an even greater mystery. There was only a maze of roads and back-streets in sight. Not a single tree or blade of grass. Even the street-lamps looked stunted.

  A mist hovered on the tops and it wasn’t till they made their descent to the city that it cleared. They entered it the back way, past the prison at Armley. A grim enough place. But the road to Hunslet was grimmer where foundries and factories replaced the housing.

  Near the river, they drove through a complex of lorry parks and large warehouses. A rail network fed into it. It was all part of the new Euro-Transport facility which took goods to the mainland via Hull. A subsidiary of Western Armaments had its warehouse there, where the loads from Pithom Hall were stored before shipment abroad.

  Tommy Barnet himself was there to meet them. He opened the gates and ushered them through quickly. Then he led them across a large car-park to the warehouse in the canal basin.

  They had to work fast. The foot patrol at present on the far side of the complex would arrive at the warehouse within the half-hour. The three detectives followed Barnet as he unlocked the warehouse and went inside.

  They hurried along the stacked crates, flashing their torches on the serial numbers to locate the mummy. When they arrived at the Cairo consignment, they began unstacking the crates. One was heavier than the rest. It contained the coffin.

  Colonel Waheeb unlocked the lid. They removed some weapons containers which hid the coffin and when they reached it they lifted it out. Ibrahim Khan grunted as he tugged at the rope handles. “Heavier than I thought,” he said. He was right. It had been sealed inside another container to hide its contents.

  He and Waheeb lowered it to Hartley and Barnet, who in turn handed them the mock-up mummy. Having put it in place and replaced the arms, they sealed the crate and stacked it with the others. Then they got clear before the patrol arrived.

  They drove straight back to Keighworth to the pathology lab where Dr Dunwell was waiting. “Thought you were never going to come,” he said, as they unloaded the mummy. They lifted it carefully out of its coffin and put it on Dunwell’s bench.

  Khan wandered off while the other two watched the pathologist insert a probe. It contained human tissue when he withdrew it. This time the body inside was for real. Dunwell took more samples then said they could take the body to the museum where the real mummy was still hidden in the curator’s store-room.

  “To the museum!” said Khan. “I thought…I thought you were going to do an autopsy.”

  “Not yet,” said Dunwell. “Doctor’s orders,” he added nodding at Colonel Waheeb.

  “It would set alarm bells ringing all the way back to Cairo if they realised we’d got the dead girl,” said Waheeb. “I’m assuming it is her. As it is, when the fake mummy arrives, they’ll think they’ve made a blunder and they’ll check the museum. If they do that, we’ll pick ’em up - and the rest of ’em in Europe.” He regarded the still figure on the bench. “Moreover, Inspector Hartley will have all the evidence he still needs to close his case. And I will know where their headquarters are in Egypt - hidden somewhere in the Temple of Hathor. The authorities have been looking for that for years - for centuries!”

  Dr Dunwell had been inspecting the samples of tissue he’d taken, holding each one up to the light.

  “No need for carbon dating here,” he remarked. “This little lot is very much nearer 2000 A.D. than B.C.”

  He strolled across to his office and put the samples in store. That done he pulled out a bottle of Scotch from his desk. “I don’t know about you folk,” he said, “but this one here needs a lifter. I’m done in. Join me?”

  Sgt Khan declined but the other two were more than ready for a drink. He poured another two whiskies. “Here’s to success. Slainte,” he said. The others raised their glasses.

  “I’ll drink to that,” said Waheeb.

  While they were sampling their drink, Khan asked about the mummy they’d retrieved.

  “Won’t it go off in the museum?” he said. “I mean, once it’s out of storage, out of its case, won’t there…well, won’t there be a smell as it decomposes?”

  Dr Dunwell pointed to his glass of whisky. “If they’ve done their job properly - and they’ve had plenty of practice over the past few thousand years - there’ll be stronger stuff inside her than I’ve got here. That correct, colonel?”

  Mordecai Waheeb nodded and said, “They’re meticulous. That’s why they’ve escaped us for so long. But now, thanks to you, Dr Dunwell, and our good friend Inspector Hartley, they are, as you say in England, almost in the bag.”

  When they’d finished their drinks, they carried the mummy back to the pick-up and drove to the museum, leaving Dr Dunwell to lock up shop. That done they returned home and reported for work the next day as usual.

  They said nothing, of course, to Superintendent Donaldson at the weekly briefing. But Inspector Hartley was in for an unpleasant surprise. While they were in Donaldson’s office, the phone rang. Tom Driscoll’s body had been recovered from the river.

  Chapter Twenty One

  The River Aire swung round in a great loop east of Keighworth. That loop marked the end of its claim to being an upland river. You didn’t catch many trout in it at Keighworth as you did further upstream, beyond Skiproyd, the gateway to the Dales. The muck from the mills up the Worth Valley had put paid to any serious trout fishing years before; to fishing of any sort except the coarsest.

  That loop of the river marked the start of its profitable if poisonous trek to Leeds and beyond. Through the heavy woollen districts, past the chemical plants nearer Leeds, which spewed their affluent into it. Then on to the mining belt before it joined the Ouse and half a dozen other rivers pouring down the Dales. At the estuary near Hull they still coined money from it as a waterway in the great port and a few smaller ones upstream, which fed coal to the power stations nearby.

  But at Keighworth, the Aire was just beginning to be commercialised. It collected waste from the mills and engineering works. It also collected suicides in that famous loop. Anyone
jumping in to meet their Maker upstream usually got tangled in the reeds in the sweep of the loop when the river was low. In winter, when it flooded, the thick banks of willows netted them.

  It was convenient for Dr Dunwell and his team. The pathology labs were close by and any bodies fished out were taken straight to their morgue. Poor Tom Driscoll had finished up on their doorstep, so to speak.

  Gus Dunwell was already at work when Inspector Hartley and Sgt Khan arrived at the riverside. The body had been spotted by some kids playing nearby. Wide-eyed, they stood at a distance as the pathologist examined the corpse. He was well into his investigation.

  As Dunwell turned the face of the corpse, Hartley remarked he knew him. So did Khan, who gave the merest glance and looked away. Both were surprised, saddened, by the discovery.

  “Been drinking, I suppose, and fell in the river. It’s happened before,” said Hartley gruffly, though inwardly he was saying a silent prayer for the dead man. He sighed. “I guessed he’d finish up like this, though I hoped he wouldn’t. He wasn’t a bad sort when sober.”

  “He wasn’t drunk and he didn’t fall in,” grunted Dunwell not looking up. Then almost casually he said, “He was murdered.”

  “Murdered?” Blake echoed. “How d’you mean? He looks very much drowned to me. No signs of injury. No bruising. No wounds.”

  “My dear Hartley, you’re not looking far enough,” replied the pathologist. He pointed to the dead man’s lips and face. “See how white his lips are? How blue the rest of his face?”

  “Aye.”

  “Sure pointers to his being smothered. Not drowned. There’s next to nothing in his lungs. He was dead long before he was dumped in the river. Whoever did it even put half a bottle of Scotch in his pocket to make it look like he’d been drinking and fallen in the river. There’s nothing on his boots either to suggest he’d been near the river when he died. No mud or grass. Some clay, though. But not from the riverside. I’d say he’d been chucked in late last night. He hasn’t been dead more than twenty-four hours. No sign of the rats chewing him up. If he’d been in the water any length of time, they’d have had a go at him.” Dr Dunwell looked across at Ibrahim Khan. He was coughing into his handkerchief. “What’s up, Khan? Am I upsetting you?”