The young Turks never stood a chance.
HER INDOORS
‘I’m afraid that all we’ve got to go on in the way of clues is in here, Sloan.’ Superintendent Leeyes picked up the neatly parcelled book on his desk and handed it across to Detective Inspector Sloan. ‘And that’s not much.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Sloan, taking the book from his superior officer with some reluctance.
‘I read it all through myself yesterday,’ said Leeyes loftily. ‘Very well written, I thought, if that’s any help.’
The book felt well bound anyway, by the feel of it, and was rather heavy. Sloan said, ‘Thank you, sir,’ aloud—and rather more under his breath.
‘The Assistant Chief Constable says that nevertheless everything you’ll need is there and he should know.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Educated chap, the ACC,’ sniffed the Superintendent, who disapproved of the man himself and of his classical education in equal parts. ‘All the background you’ll ever possibly need is there, too.’
‘I’m sure,’ echoed Sloan dutifully. He was really too busy to enter into even the spirit of this sort of assignment let alone the reality. ‘You say, sir, that we don’t even know the lady’s name?’
‘Not her Christian name. That’s why—strictly for the purposes of this inquiry alone—we’re calling her Mrs P. We only know her husband’s and her son’s names for certain—and her daughter’s, of course, though the daughter’s name doesn’t get mentioned any more after what happened … and I for one am not surprised about that.’
‘Portrait turned to the wall?’ suggested Sloan delicately. ‘You could say that, Sloan. In a manner of speaking, anyway. Not that that helps us with the mother’s name.’
‘Mrs P’s age, sir? Is that known?’
‘I reckon we could have what you might call an educated guess at that, Sloan.’
Detective Inspector Sloan got out his notebook. A guess was better than nothing.
‘Mr P’ pronounced the Superintendent weightily, ‘was a doddering old fool and tedious with it.’
‘So she killed him?’ asked Sloan, anxious to get on with another case.
‘Certainly not, Sloan. He was killed by their daughter’s boyfriend.’
‘Mrs P might have been younger than her husband, then?’ suggested Sloan, his train of thought going off at a tangent to another scenario that included toy-boys and gigolos.
‘Well, she might,’ conceded Leeyes, ‘but remember she did have a grown-up son.’ He grunted. ‘Actually now I come to think about it, the son seemed to me to have been about the only one in the whole set-up who behaved like a grown-up.’
Sloan sighed. ‘That’ll be a great help, that will, sir.’ Juvenile behaviour in those old enough to know better was a perennial cross that all policemen had to learn to bear with what grace they could.
‘Even though he was nearly as free with his advice as his father, and that’s saying something.’
Detective Inspector Sloan was beginning to feel quite some sympathy towards the unidentified Mrs P.
‘Even,’ rumbled on Leeyes, ‘his sister thought he was getting like a preacher.’
‘Pointing morals?’
‘Saying one thing and doing another,’ said Leeyes tartly.
‘Ah.’
‘Mind you, Mrs P can’t have been all that young, Sloan, because the son must have been—well, say early twenties like his sister’s boyfriend.’
‘The boyfriend who murdered Mr P?’ Sloan tried to get at least one thing clear in his mind.
The Superintendent raised an admonitory hand. ‘I don’t think we can use the word murder in connection with that particular death, Sloan. It wouldn’t be wise. Not just yet.’
‘No? But, sir, I thought the old man was stabbed or something?’
‘So he was, Sloan, but the killer just lunged at the curtain. We don’t know for certain—that is, a clever lawyer would be able to cast plenty of doubt around—that the killer knew Mr P would be standing there on the other side of it at the exact time that the curtain was stabbed. There’s no real evidence, you see.’
‘So the friend just went around stabbing at curtains, then, did he?’
‘Well, he was a bit of a funny lad,’ admitted Leeyes enigmatically. ‘There’s a family history there that people have gone into a lot …’
‘The Crown Prosecution Service wouldn’t have liked that.’ Daniel M’Naghten may have been long dead and gone but he and his Rules on criminal insanity still cast their shadow over the successful prosecution of the mentally unbalanced who came to judgement.
‘The Crown Prosecution didn’t like any of it,’ said Superintendent Leeyes, adding vigorously: ‘and as far as I’m concerned, Sloan, you can drop the word “service” in connection with anything to do with them. They may be a lot of odd things but service they most definitely aren’t.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Detective Inspector Sloan kept his peace and let this particular bee circle round in the Superintendent’s bonnet without comment.
‘Not that the son’s friend is our concern anyway.’ Superintendent Leeyes straightened his shoulders.
‘No?’
‘No. He was in enough trouble on his own account and he’s already had more written about him than practically any other man alive.’ The Superintendent waved his finger. ‘Just you remember that it’s the character of Mrs P that the Assistant Chief Constable wanted my—wants your opinion on—your opinion as a working detective, that is.’
‘I see, sir.’ Detective Inspector Sloan was only too happy to try to get back to the point even if this was the oddest job that had come his way in many a long year in the Calleshire Police Force. ‘So,’ he said patiently, ‘we do know that she was the wife of an old man and the mother of a young one and therefore roughly middle-aged?’
‘Yes,’ admitted Leeyes grudgingly. ‘I don’t think that that can be other than right.’ The Superintendent would, they both knew, have faulted Sloan’s reasoning if he possibly could have done from sheer force of habit.
‘But I take it, sir, that we do know quite a lot about her husband before he was murd—killed?’
‘Not really. Except that he was keen on amateur dramatics—bit of an actor himself in his youth and something of a critic, otherwise …’
Sloan waited.
‘Otherwise, we only really know him by how he behaved and by what he said,’ amplified Superintendent Leeyes carefully.
‘When you come to think of it, sir, I dare say that’s the only way anyone ever knows anyone else anyway.’
‘Very possibly, Sloan.’ The Superintendent ignored this tempting philosophical by-way and said: ‘It’s all down in that book though.’
Sloan stared at the fat tome. He’d never have time to wade through all that. Hoping that there were no feminists within earshot he asked: ‘What was Mr P’s occupation?’ The feminists, he knew, would argue that Mrs P shouldn’t be assessed on the nature of her husband’s way of earning his livelihood but he would have to make a start somewhere or he’d be here all night …
‘That,’ harrumphed Leeyes, ‘seems to have been disputed. Civil servant probably but the daughter’s boyfriend insisted he was only a fishmonger.’
‘Going to marry above her station, sir, was she?’ divined Sloan without difficulty. Presumably Mrs P would have been pleased about that.
‘Not if Mr P could help it,’ said Leeyes firmly. ‘You just read the case up in that book, Sloan, and see for yourself how shockingly Mr P mucked up his daughter’s love life, poor girl.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Mind you, I’d have had doubts myself about her boyfriend as a future son-in-law so I dare say Mr P had, too. A right mixed-up kiddo if you ask me …’
‘You don’t think, sir, do you, that someone at the station here with family therapy experience would do better than me at this assignment? Or,’ he added, since the Superintendent was more than something of a misogynist, ‘even a woman? Woman Police Ser
geant Perkins is very good at domestics.’
Superintendent Leeyes’ response was unusually oblique. ‘Now, Sloan, don’t be put off by the size of that book. I tell you it’s mostly background, and you won’t have to read it all. Just the relevant bits. After all, the kid’s only fourteen.’
‘What kid?’
‘Never you mind,’ said Leeyes severely. ‘Just you concentrate on finding out all you can about Mrs P like the Assistant Chief wants.’
‘Via her husband and son?’
‘There isn’t anyone else—that we know about, that is.’
Detective Inspector Sloan toyed with the delicious temptation of saying to the Superintendent that if the Assistant Chief Constable wanted a miracle then he, Sloan, would have to go back home for his wand; but he thought better of it. There was, after all, not only his pension to think of but his hard-won reputation as a working detective to consider.
‘I think, sir,’ he reasoned carefully, ‘that Mrs P was probably outwardly compliant but inwardly seething when her husband pontificated on family matters. Otherwise she’d have left him long ago.’
‘Sanctimonious wasn’t in it,’ agreed Leeyes, ‘when Mr P got going. I can tell you that. You name it and he’d give you advice on it.’
‘Trying,’ agreed Sloan, who knew from hard experience how irksome a ready word in a difficult police investigation could be. ‘Very trying. So,’ he added briskly, ‘I suggest we can assume she developed coping techniques in that direction. Switched off mentally whenever he opened his mouth, I expect, or she’d have gone under.’
‘There’s another thing,’ said Leeyes, who didn’t seem to have been listening, ‘as you’ll see when you read what he said.’ Superintendent Leeyes pointed to the book in Sloan’s hand. ‘Mr P wasn’t the sort of man to let Mrs P pop out and borrow a cup of sugar from the people next door or ask for the loan of a screw of tea, come to that. According to him they had to be self-sufficient no matter what.’
‘So,’ concluded Sloan ineluctably, ‘she was a good manager then, too.’
‘Must have been. Her husband was very hot on good husbandry.’
‘Hard done by with the housekeeping, was she, then, too, sir?’
‘Shouldn’t be surprised,’ Leeyes said. ‘But not in every way.’
‘Oh?’
‘Mr P was the living proof of that bit of Shakespeare’s about wearing what you could afford.’
A good dress allowance, thought Sloan to himself, could have been little comfort in Mrs P’s exiguous circumstances. If it was a good allowance, that is. He indicated the book. ‘Do any of the family ever quote her?’
Leeyes shook his head. ‘Not once that I heard about.’
That, thought the Detective Inspector to himself, could be good or bad. Mrs P might have been one of those strong silent women who said nothing memorable from choice: or, equally, was too tentative to commit herself.
‘Her son did once describe her brows as chaste and unsmirched,’ volunteered Leeyes unexpectedly, ‘but the Assistant Chief Constable wouldn’t accept that as real evidence …’
‘Coming from the son?’
‘Didn’t think it was reliable enough for his son to use.’
‘Hearsay from an interested party?’ suggested Sloan, by now more than a trifle confused himself in the matter of sons. ‘You’d have thought, sir, wouldn’t you,’ he added, ‘that Mr P would have said something to his son like “Your mother says to wear your thick coat when it’s cold”.’
It was the sort of embarrassing remark that his own father had made to him when he was no longer a boy. ‘More likely to have been a warning about the French,’ muttered Leeyes, ‘since he was so busy arranging for a friend to spy on the lad when he was in Paris.’ He grimaced. ‘And much good that did him.’
Sloan made one last bid for Mr P as common-or-garden pater familias by appealing to the Superintendent’s legendary xenophobia. ‘You know what Frenchmen are …’
‘These weren’t,’ said Leeyes briefly.
Sloan shook his head. ‘I’m afraid that she—Mrs P, that is—is proving a bit—well, difficult to catch hold of, sir, isn’t she?’
‘Just what the Assistant Chief Constable said himself,’ said Leeyes triumphantly. ‘Quite put out about it, he was when he went into it. Nebulous was the word he used.’
It wasn’t the one Sloan was looking for. He thought that Mrs P must have been definite enough.
Cowed? He wasn’t sure.
Talked to death by her husband and son?
Very probably.
‘I reckon she was better off as widow than as wife, anyway, sir, no matter what,’ he said aloud.
‘That’s a good point,’ said Leeyes grandly.
‘A bit of peace and quiet can’t have come amiss, sir.’ Sloan thought that Mrs P had probably dealt very early on in her marriage with what the hymn-writer had called ‘the murmurings of self-will’.
‘I’ll tell the Assistant Chief Constable you said so,’ promised Leeyes.
‘I think,’ said Sloan even more categorically, ‘she would really have had to have been a woman who bit down hard before speaking …’
‘That figures,’ said Leeyes.
‘… who obeyed her husband without challenging him. At least, from what you’ve said, sir, Mr P doesn’t seem to have behaved like a man challenged on the domestic front.’
‘True,’ said Leeyes.
Sloan waxed a little more expansive still. ‘Of course, sir, Mr P just might have been the reverse of the usual man—a saint at home and a devil abroad …’
‘Hrrmmmph,’ said Leeyes, who was inclined to take everything personally.
‘But,’ hurried on Sloan, ‘somehow I don’t think so. He sounded to have been an interfering old buzzard to me.’
The Superintendent nodded sagely. ‘As character assassinations go, Sloan, that’s not too bad.’
‘Mrs P must have had a hard time,’ said Sloan, ‘all the same.’
Hard times bred a certain cast of mind in a woman; he knew that. That was more grist to the Assistant Chief Constable’s mill and he said so to the Superintendent.
‘He said the boy would be grateful for anything, Sloan.’
‘What boy?’
‘His son,’ Leeyes said, adding sedulously, ‘Didn’t I say?’
‘No, sir. You didn’t.’
‘It’s his son who’s been landed with the job, you see—his father just wanted to know if we could help and seeing as his father is the Assistant Chief Constable …’
‘I see all right, sir, thank you,’ responded Sloan stiffly. ‘It’s quite clear to me now.’
‘You must know what it’s like, Sloan,’ said the Superintendent, ‘when a kid can’t do his homework and asks his father for help …’
‘And his father can’t do it either …’
‘But I thought we could,’ said Leeyes, who was inclined to use the Royal ‘we’ when it suited him.
‘This Mrs P, sir,’ said Sloan, weighing the heavy book in his hand consideringly. ‘Do we happen to know—I mean, is it known—where she lived?’
‘Oh, didn’t I say that either?’ murmured the Superintendent shamelessly.
‘No.’
‘She lived in Denmark.’
‘Elsinore?’ said Sloan.
‘That’s right. You see, it was his English homework that the ACC’s son couldn’t get anywhere with this week.’
‘I see, sir,’ said Sloan tonelessly.
‘… and the homework was an essay on Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Describe Mrs Polonius given Polonius and Laertes”. Quite amazing what these schoolmasters dream up, isn’t it?’
About the Author
Catherine Aird is the author of more than twenty volumes of detective mysteries and three collections of short stories. Most of her fiction features Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan and Detective Constable W. E. Crosby. Aird holds an honorary master’s degree from the University of Kent and was made a Member of the Most Excellent O
rder of the British Empire (MBE) for her services to the Girl Guide Association. She lives in a village in East Kent, England.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Steady as she Goes © 1992; this story first appeared in First Culprit (Chatto & Windus, 1992)
The Man Who Rowed for the Shore © 1992; this story first appeared in The Man Who … Anthology (Macmillan, 1992)
A Fair Cop © 1994
Jeopardy © 1994
Lord Peter’s Touch © 1990; this story first appeared in Encounters with Lord Peter (The Dorothy Sayers Society, 1990)
Memory Corner © 1994
Slight of Hand © 1993; this story first appeared in Second Culprit (Chatto & Windus, 1993)
Cause and Effects © 1990; this story first appeared in A Classic English Crime (Pavilion Books, 1990)
The Hard Sell © 1994
One Under the Eight © 1994
Bare Essentials © 1994
Home is the Hunter © 1988; this story first appeared in the Crime Writers’ Association Anthology (Gollancz, 1988)
Blue Upright © 1994
Devilled Dip ©1994
The Misjudgement of Paris © 1994
Her Indoors © 1994
Copyright © 1996 by Catherine Aird
Cover design by Tracey Dunham
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1062-7
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
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