‘And knock spots off them, I suppose?’
The young man shook his head. ‘Not if I can help it, but it’s not always as easy as that. Some of these old boys may not hit a long ball but they’re deadly round the green.’
‘And they don’t always have to lug their trolleys round with them,’ he said. ‘Which of the two,’ he asked idly, ‘had the electric trolley?’ William Culshaw had looked a fit man to him—he had yet to interview Stanley Cox.
The professional frowned. ‘Neither. Not if you’re talking about Mr Culshaw and Mr Cox.’
‘I am.’
‘Then they don’t have electric trolleys,’ said the professional firmly. ‘Either of them. They went round this morning without and I know because I was behind them all the way round.’
Sloan stiffened. ‘Don’t leave here until I come back …’ He went straight back to the health farm and into the old flower room. The two golf trolleys were still there, one with its battery contrivance on the cross shaft. He bent down to examine it. It certainly comprised electrical equipment of some sort. Two leads came out of it, one now clamped to each leg of the golf trolley.
He straightened up and started to think hard.
At a guess the two leads could have reached the water pipe above the skirting board—but something was beginning to make him think they had. He’d need a magnifying lens to know for sure if they’d ever been clamped to the pipes instead of the golf trolley legs—not that this told him anything.
Yet.
Nor did the name plate on the equipment, which was German.
He stood there alone for a long minute and thought hard. There was something stirring in his memory—something to do with his brother-in-law’s house. That was it. That house had been a real jerry-built affair of bodged workmanship and they’d thought they’d have big trouble when they’d needed to drain the hot-water system. There hadn’t been a drain tap, that was what had worried his brother-in-law, not a mechanical man.
It hadn’t fazed the plumber one little bit.
No, he’d come along with a big box of tricks, plugged into the electricity, cut through the pipe and put a drain tap in the hot-water system without losing a drop of water. ‘Behold, the iceman cometh,’ was how his brother-in-law had described it.
Detective Inspector Sloan left the flower room and went back to the lounge where William Culshaw was having his statement read over to him by Detective Constable Crosby.
‘Just a few more questions, sir,’ said Sloan at his smoothest. ‘Can you just tell me again what you did when you got back from the golf course?’
‘Had a bit of a wash and brush up,’ said Culshaw, ‘put on a tie and so forth—they’re quite particular here—and went along to the bar to have a drink with Stanley Cox.’
‘And then?’
‘Went into luncheon with him.’
‘Did you go back to the flower room before you went to eat?’
‘I did,’ said Culshaw, nodding. ‘I thought I might have dropped my pen there and I had.’
‘I think,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan coldly, ‘that you went back to the flower room to remove two connecting leads from the hot-water pipe leading to the Hot Room and to unlock the door of the Hot Room which you had locked as you came in from your round of golf.’
The colour of Culshaw’s face told a tale all of its own, incapable of subterfuge by its possessor.
‘You had applied these when you came in from golf,’ said Sloan, ‘and while you were having a drink the apparatus refrigerated the water in the pipe causing it to freeze and block the pipe …’
The man’s colour had gone from grey to putty.
‘Thus cutting off the water supply,’ continued Sloan, unmoved, ‘from which the steam for the Hot Room was made for about twenty minutes.’
And from putty colour to paper white.
‘Which,’ said Sloan, making a sign to Detective Constable Crosby, ‘was long enough to bring about the death of your wife.’
HOME IS THE HUNTER
‘Ever had anything to do with an Extradition Order, Sloan?’ asked Police Superintendent Leeyes.
‘No, sir,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan warily.
‘Now’s your chance, then,’ said Leeyes.
‘Sir?’
‘It’s never too late to learn,’ said Leeyes. ‘All the good books say so.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Sloan, since this was very true.
The Superintendent consulted a piece of paper on his desk. ‘It’s from France.’
‘A friendly power.’
The Superintendent, suspecting irony, ignored this. ‘A Madame Vercollas of 17 rue de la Pierre Blanche, St-Amand d’Huiss … Huisse …’ Leeyes gave up the unequal struggle to pronounce Huisselot. ‘Anyway she’s here in Berebury now, which is all that matters to us.’
‘Keeps it simple,’ agreed Sloan.
‘Nothing like your own patch.’ The Superintendent’s xenophobia was well known to embrace the next county to Calleshire as well as the next country to England. He had always been one to equate stranger with enemy.
‘And the French would like her back, would they, sir?’ asked Sloan, getting out his notebook.
‘They would,’ growled Leeyes. He pushed the Extradition Order from the Home Office across the desk. ‘She’s wanted on a charge of murdering her husband, Louis Vercollas, at a place called Corbeaux last September.’
Sloan picked up the paper. ‘I take it, sir, that the fine detail isn’t anything to do with us.’
‘Not really,’ said the Superintendent, a trifle wistfully. He always liked to have a finger in any pie that was going.
‘Just a matter of handing her over to the French, then?’
‘That’s all. The Home Office has agreed to her extradition.’ Leeyes sounded regretful at this. It went against the grain with him for the British to co-operate with any foreign power, but especially with the French. The Superintendent blamed metrication entirely on Napoleon Bonaparte. ‘It should be all quite straightforward …’
‘Does she speak English?’
‘She is English,’ said Leeyes. ‘It’s her husband who was French.’
‘I see, sir.’
‘And Sloan …’
‘Sir?’
‘You might as well take Crosby with you. It’ll get him off my back for the afternoon.’
If possible, Detective Constable Crosby was even more insular than the Superintendent. ‘Do we have to deport her ourselves?’ he asked as they drove down Berebury High Street.
‘She’s not being deported,’ explained Sloan patiently. ‘Deportation’s when we’re kicking someone out of the country. Extradition’s when they’re being asked for by another country with which we have a treaty.’
‘Vive la difference!’ said the Constable, changing gear.
In due course the police car reached a neat semi-detached house in a quiet street in a residential area of the town. The doorbell was answered by a pleasant-faced, middle-aged woman.
‘Madame Vercollas?’ began Sloan.
The woman shook her head. ‘That’s my sister. I’m Anne Pickford. Come in and I’ll get her for you.’ She led the way into the sitting-room, calling out: ‘Laura, someone to see you! Can you come?’
Madame Vercollas was a younger edition of the woman who had answered the door. ‘Good afternoon …’
Sloan explained the nature of their errand. Laura Vercollas sat down rather suddenly in one of the armchairs. Her sister murmured something about a cup of tea and retreated to the kitchen.
‘I’m sorry to be silly, Inspector,’ said Laura Vercollas wanly. ‘I ought to have known why you had come. My notary in Huisselot warned me to expect all this.’
‘Quite so.’
‘But he didn’t know how long the formalities would take.’
Sloan cleared his throat. ‘Well, the due processes of law have been gone through now and I must warn you that …’
‘Yes, yes,’ she interrupted quickly. ‘I d
o understand the procedure.’ She twisted her lips into an awkward smile. ‘In a way, Inspector, it’s a relief that you’ve come and the waiting’s over.’
He nodded with suitable gravity. Just as sometimes it was better to travel hopefully than to arrive, sometimes it was a relief when the axe fell … He pulled himself together, glad he hadn’t spoken aloud. He wasn’t at all sure if they still used the guillotine across the Channel.
‘At least,’ said Madame Vercollas stoutly, ‘I shall have a chance to tell the court that I didn’t kill my husband, in spite of what they say.’
‘Can you prove it, though?’ asked Detective Constable Crosby with interest.
She turned her gaze in his direction. ‘I don’t know. My husband was—well—rather older than I, and not a well man. He died in a strange hotel from a massive dose of a narcotic, and the French police say that I gave it to him.’
‘Tea,’ said Anne Pickford, coming into the room with a tray and dispelling any lingering doubts that Sloan might have had that both sisters were English.
‘And you say you didn’t poison him,’ said Crosby, leaning forward with the air of one trying to get something clear.
Madame Vercollas nodded gently. ‘I didn’t kill Louis.’
‘The evidence …’ began Crosby, to whom the arm’s length nature of an Extradition Order had not been explained.
‘Is all against me,’ she said at once.
‘Now, now, Laura,’ said her sister, ‘you mustn’t be defeatist.’
Detective Inspector Sloan, who prized realism for its own sake, hitched his shoulders forward and said: ‘You understand, madam, that it is the French authorities who …’
‘I understand all right,’ she said calmly, ‘and I don’t blame them for thinking as they do. For one thing, we were strangers in Corbeaux. I’d never even seen the place before.’
‘How did you come to be there?’ asked Sloan.
‘We were staying in a resort about twenty miles away—Louis thought a holiday might do him good—when suddenly something or somebody there upset Louis and he insisted on leaving the hotel there and then and finding somewhere else that very night.’ She hesitated. ‘He was like that.’
‘A difficult man,’ pronounced Anne Pickford judiciously.
Laura Vercollas didn’t deny this. She said, ‘That’s something else they’re holding against me: that he wasn’t easy to live with …’
‘And you just happened on Corbeaux?’ asked Sloan, interested in spite of himself.
‘Louis pointed to the map and said: “We’ll try there.”’
‘He drove?’
‘I drove and he directed me,’ she said. ‘It was practically dark by the time we arrived but he must have had a map because he steered me through the town all right—except for a one-way street that I had to reverse out of. He told me when to stop and I found we were outside the Hôtel Coq d’Or in the Place Dr Jacques Colliard.’
‘He went in?’
‘I went in, Inspector. Louis didn’t move about more than he had to. Not since his last illness. He told me to book a room for five nights, and so I did.’
‘Why five?’
‘I don’t know. But in the end, oddly enough, I was there for the five.’
‘You had dinner there?’
She twisted her lips wryly. ‘That’s something else the police are holding against me. I think they think I’m another Madame de Brinvilliers. Louis wanted to have dinner in our room so they brought it up. We ate alone. You can see how their minds work, can’t you?’
‘More tea?’ asked Anne Pickford.
Laura Vercollas was not diverted. ‘Corbeaux is one of those bastide towns with a war memorial and fountain in the middle of the square. We had our meal looking out on to the Place. It was lit up and rather nice. And in the morning when I woke up Louis was dead in bed.’
‘Had you had snails?’ enquired Crosby, who could not have been described as exactly Francophile. ‘Or frogs’ legs?’
The ghost of a smile crossed her face. ‘Potage and bœuf bourgugnon. Nothing likely to upset anyone.’ She paused. ‘Louis had been ill—I think I told you—and he was always careful what he had in the evening in case it kept him awake. He slept badly enough anyway and he had a lot of nightmares when he did get to sleep. He often used to call out for the doctor in the night, but it was in his sleep. He talked a lot in his sleep,’ she said flatly.
‘What about?’ asked Sloan. In his book talking while asleep was a passkey to the subconscious mind.
‘It was double Dutch to me,’ said the Englishwoman of the Frenchman. ‘Names mostly. Hercule, Jean-Paul, François—they were always cropping up.’
‘Did you never ask him who they were?’
‘Once,’ she said in a reserved manner.
‘And?’
‘He moved into the second bedroom.’ She clasped her hands rigidly in her lap. ‘You must remember, Inspector, that he was much older than me and I was his second wife.’
‘That saying,’ put in her sister truculently, ‘about it being better to be an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave isn’t true.’
Laura Vercollas flushed. ‘Let us say it was a marriage of convenience.’
‘His convenience,’ added Anne Pickford tartly.
‘What happened next?’ asked Crosby, who was still a bachelor.
‘The hotel proprietor sent for the doctor. I explained about Louis’s illness and showed him all the medicines he had been having for it. He said that since we were strangers in Corbeaux he would telephone our doctor in Huisselot.’
‘Then what?’
‘At first everything was all right—well, straightforward anyway. I saw the undertaker and so forth and went to have a look at the cemetery—the French make rather a thing of their cemeteries.’
Sloan nodded. Even he had heard of pompe funèbre.
‘It was outside the town and I couldn’t find Louis’s map in the car, but I got there in the end.’ She looked at the two policemen. ‘There was no point in my taking him back to Huisselot. It hadn’t been his home town or anything, and when I came to think of it I didn’t even know where his parents and sister were buried. It had never cropped up, and in any case he was a very secretive man.’
‘Quite so,’ said Sloan.
‘All I knew was their names—Henri Georges and Clothilde Marie. The sister was Clémence …’ Her voice trailed away as if she had just remembered something.
‘What is it?’ asked Sloan sharply.
‘Nothing.’ She shook her head. ‘I arranged the funeral and ordered some of those marble éternelles that aren’t allowed in England, and then …’
‘Then?’ prompted Sloan.
‘Then the doctor said that there would have to be a post-mortem after all. All of his sleeping draught had gone, you see.’
‘That’s when they found out about the narcotic poisoning?’ said Sloan soberly.
She nodded.
‘Didn’t the fools think about suicide?’ said Crosby, forgetting all about the professional entente cordiale that was supposed to exist between national police forces.
‘There was no note,’ said Laura Vercollas with the air of one repeating a well-rehearsed list. ‘There had been no threats to end his life at any time. He wasn’t in pain, and generally speaking physically ill people don’t do it. To say nothing,’ she added painfully, ‘of its being a funny time and place to choose—the first night in a strange hotel in a strange town.’
‘Looks black, doesn’t it,’ agreed Crosby ingenuously.
‘Louis wasn’t exactly poor either.’ Laura Vercollas apparently couldn’t resist piling Pelion upon Ossa. ‘That interested the French police a lot.’
‘I’ll bet,’ said the Constable warmly.
‘That’s all very well,’ said Laura Vercollas with spirit, ‘but I didn’t put that sleeping draught into the wine or the soup, no matter what anyone says.’
Had Crosby been French he might have said ‘Bravo’ to that
. Instead he looked distinctly mournful. ‘They’ve got everything on a plate, though, haven’t they?’
‘A strange hotel in a strange room,’ said Sloan slowly, ‘and yet your husband found it easily enough.’
‘He had a map.’
‘No,’ said Sloan quietly. ‘You couldn’t find the map, could you?’
She stared at him.
‘And the only mistake he made in getting to the hotel was directing you up a one-way street.’
‘Ye … es,’ she said uncertainly.
‘Streets that have been two-way can be made one-way.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘When you mentioned your husband’s parents’ names just now,’ said Sloan swiftly, ‘you were going to say something else.’
‘It was nothing, Inspector. Only a coincidence.’
‘Coincidence and circumstantial evidence sometimes go hand in hand,’ said Sloan sternly, hoping that he might be forgiven by an unknown number of defence counsels for picking one of their best lines.
‘It was when I was in the cemetery,’ said Laura Vercollas. ‘I wandered about a bit, as one does, and I just happened to notice a tombstone to another husband and wife called Henri Georges and Clothilde Marie, that’s all. Not the same surname. It was just a coincidence.’
‘And Clémence?’ asked Sloan softly.
She shook her head. ‘There was a Clémence but in another part of the ceme—’ She stopped and stared at him.
‘Madame Vercollas,’ he said, ‘think carefully. You arrived in Corbeaux after dark.’
‘Yes.’
‘You yourself went into the hotel and arranged the room. Not your husband.’
‘Yes.’
‘You had your meal not in the dining-room but in your bedroom.’
‘Yes.’
‘Who answered the door to the waiter who brought it up?’
‘I did.’
‘Did he see your husband?’
‘No. He was in the bathroom when he came.’
‘So no one in Corbeaux actually saw your husband?’
‘No one.’
‘Did that not strike you as very strange?’
‘I hadn’t thought about it.’
Sloan watched her face intently. ‘Had your husband ever mentioned Corbeaux in the past?’
Injury Time Page 12
