A Dead Liberty (20 page)

“Industrial espionage is on the increase,” said Sloan less demotically.

“Someone with a key,” said Crosby, “opened the gate that let the demonstrators in to where the tunnel is.” The taxi-cab had dropped so far behind as not to be a challenge to his thinking.

“And telephoned to say that the gate would be open …”

“With the key in the lock on the inside,” Crosby reminded him, “to keep us out.”

“Quite so,” said Sloan, intrigued by the detective constable's use of the word “us.” He didn't usually identify himself with the force at all.

“But mucking up an opening ceremony in Calleshire is hardly likely to damage a contract in Dlasa, is it, sir?”

“It might only have been …” began Sloan and then changed his tone as a lightning flash of adrenalin coursed through his system. “Mind that lorry!”

“Plenty of room,” said Crosby airily.

Sloan hung on to the shreds of his temper with an almost palpable effort. “Just you remember, Crosby,” he said between gritted teeth, “that it's not only a car that can be recalled by its maker.”

“Think they own the road,” said Crosby. “That's their trouble.”

“Our trouble,” said Sloan pertinently, “is that we're not getting anywhere with an investigation that should have been over and done with days ago.”

“Concrete evidence,” said Crosby, “that's what we haven't got, isn't it?”

“Yet,” said Sloan.

“Back to the drawing board?” suggested Crosby. “Do you know, sir, I'd never seen a real drawing board until we went to see that fellow Bolsover. He's got proper stand-up jobs there in his office.”

“I daresay he needs them,” said Sloan absently. It was always interesting to trace figures of speech back to their origins. Architects drew standing, didn't they? Like, according to Vespasian, emperors should die.

“Don't know where we'd begin,” said Crosby. “It's not like a tunnel, is it, where you've got two ends.”

Sloan suspected that even starting a tunnel on paper wasn't as simple as all that. “Myself,” he said, “in a murder case I like to begin with the body.”

“It's all we've got anyway, sir, isn't it?” said Crosby realistically.

“Very true.” There hadn't even been an empty bottle of hyoscine around. Inspector Porritt had searched the Old Rectory at Brattle Episcopi for evidence in vain. “Just a body.”

“Rather a bashed one,” said Crosby, “what with the car accident and all that.”

“Rugby's a rough game at the best of times,” murmured Sloan.

“Yes, sir.” The games of Detective Constable Crosby's childhood had all been with a round ball. That didn't mean that they had been any the gentler for it, just different.

“I suppose, though,” said Sloan, “that what we know about Carline's last weekend begins there. We'd better check on the match in the local paper …”

“We know something earlier than that,” said Crosby intelligently. The road fore and aft was momentarily clear and he had nothing else to interest him. “On the Friday afternoon the deceased saw Mr. Bolsover and made another appointment with him for the Monday morning.”

“So we do.” Sloan hitched his shoulders. “We have a timetable, then. That'll give us somewhere to start on a new drawing board.” He wondered how many times Trevor Porritt had done this in preparing the case of the Crown
v
. Lucy Mirabel Durmast.

“Friday Carline sees the deputy chairman of the firm.”

“Saturday he plays Rugby,” said Sloan.

“Sunday he licks his wounds.”

“Monday he sees Mr. Bolsover again,” said Sloan.

“Has lunch with the accused …”

“Crashes his car.”

“Taken to hospital.”

“Dies,” said Sloan succinctly.

“This is the end of Solomon Grundy,” chanted Crosby. “Ah, here's our road …”

Detective Inspector Sloan decided to try to exercise mind over matter. He deliberately averted his gaze from the way ahead and considered the alleged murder of Kenneth Carline by Lucy Durmast, it was said for reasons of the heart. He had been taught at the Police Training College that there were five natural emotions: fear, grief, anger, jealousy and love. The man who had done the teaching had appeared to be without any of them—dispassionate, colourless, academic. Most of those who had instructed police officers at their training colleges had seemed like that man and yet he had finished his spiel quite unselfconsciously with something very near to parody. “And the greatest of these,” he had said, “is love.”

If the murder was for any other reason than love there was a conspicuous absence of visible ill-gotten gains. The balance sheet of William Durmast's firm had contained nothing exceptional. A careful Trevor Porritt had checked that early on in his investigation. Inspector Porritt had been a thorough, painstaking officer who hadn't, as far as he could see, overlooked anything that he, Sloan, could think of. And much good being a thorough, painstaking officer had done the poor chap. Sloan bet that Porritt had never dreamt when he went on duty the day of his accident that it was going to be his last in the Force. What was it that the cynics said—the worst case is never envisaged and always encountered.

He tightened his lips subconsciously. Now he was beginning to think like Superintendent Leeyes. That would never do. And yet it was perhaps just this very capacity for looking on the black side that separated the men from the boys. He pulled his thoughts together with a jerk, determined not to let a natural pessimism triumph.

All that was wrong, he told himself firmly, was that there were too many unknown factors in this particular equation which equalled murder. His old maths master would have said “Let
x
equal the number you don't know” and gone on in his gentle, persuasive way to reason how letting that
x
equal the unknown factor and
y
and
z
represent what you did know, you could work out the value of
x
in a trice.

Only this time he didn't know what
y
and
z
were equal to either, and since they, too, were unknown he couldn't even begin on his equation. Not that he was a mathematician anyway—innumerate, the maths master had called him on his school report. Gentle the teacher might have been, but there were no untruths in mathematics and he saw no reason for equivocation in his comments to Sloan's father. He'd been right, of course. Even now only Imperial measures really meant anything to Sloan in his mind's eye. It would be all right for those youngsters who had been brought up on the metric system alone—a sort of reverse of “those who only England know …”

Perhaps they should be going back to an abacus rather than a drawing board, and yet if money had come into murder, he, Sloan, professional policeman, was blessed if he could see where. True, Ronald Bolsover and Kenneth Carline had been on their way to the Palgrave Tunnel to discuss the handing over of the last of their retention fee to the contractors—Clopton's—for the construction of the tunnel when Carline had come to grief, but a meticulous Trevor Porritt had even checked that out. All the fees had been paid and the completed works duly handed over to the County Surveyor on schedule and the Department of Transport so informed so that it could do its share of the funding.

“It's a pity there's so little in the way of circumstantial evidence,” he heard himself saying aloud to the detective constable at his side.

“For or against?”

“That's an interesting point,” he said gravely.

“There's that powerfully flavoured stuff Lucy Durmast served him up with,” said Crosby, blissfully untroubled by the pedantic positioning of prepositions. “Why did she bother if she hadn't got something to hide?”

“Alimentary, my dear Watson …” Sloan allowed himself a measure of unaccustomed latitude.

“Pardon, sir?”

“Nothing.”

Crosby swung the steering wheel over and took the fork in the road that would lead them back in due course to the County of Calleshire, and said “Lucy is short for Lucretia.”

“I am well aware of that, thank you, Crosby.” He turned his attention back to the road ahead. “But if I may say so, it is not a particularly helpful remark at this juncture.”

“Sorry, sir.” The constable straightened up the wheel.

Detective Inspector Sloan, too, sensed that the city was behind them. He put his notebook into his brief-case. Country mice they might be, but there was no doubt that the city didn't have the solution to their problem.

Whether the African continent did was another matter entirely.

Crosby shared the sentiment. “Funny, sir, though all the same, that fellow Prince Aturu disappearing just when he did.”

Sloan couldn't see where Prince Aturu or his departure fitted into the picture at all and said so.

“Perhaps he was afraid he would be the next to die,” rejoined the constable, his foot resuming the accelerator.

In spite of their fears, in the event it wasn't Prince Aturu, son of King Thabile the Third of Dlasa, who was the next to die, nor even Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan, Head of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Berebury Division of the Calleshire County Constabulary, unhappy passenger in a fast car.

The first inkling that Sloan had that somebody else might have done so though was when Detective Constable Crosby swung their car into the car park behind the Police Station at Berebury. It was unusually crowded, and standing in the middle of the yard, causing even greater congestion, was the caravan that served variously as an information office, mobile rest room and murder van.

“Something's up,” observed Crosby.

“Something big,” concluded Sloan. “That's the assistant chief constable's car over there.”

To say that Superintendent Leeyes was glad to see the two officers was something of an understatement. “There you are at last, Sloan,” he barked. “You can forget the Carline murder for a while. We've got one on our own patch.”

“Sir?”

“Body found in a ditch off the Calleford road,” he said tersely. “About half an hour ago. Get out there now before anyone else mucks anything about …”

“Who?”

“All I know,” snapped Leeyes whom sudden death made especially irritable, “is that the victim is young and female.”

Sloan nodded sadly. Victims usually were young and female.

“She hasn't been identified yet,” Leeyes surged on. “They're waiting until Dr. Dabbe gets there before they touch anything.”

It did not occur to Sloan to admonish Crosby about his speed on the journey out of Berebury to a spot just outside the town on the Calleford road and it was in record time that they slid to a halt behind the car belonging to Dr. Dabbe, Consultant Pathologist to the Berebury District General Hospital.

The doctor was down in the ditch, being very careful indeed about where he put his feet. Someone had rigged up a makeshift duckboard for him, but it didn't reach quite far enough.

The body was lying face down in a mixture of grass and water, but Detective Inspector Sloan could see all he needed to from where he stood. He needed neither to go nearer nor to see the girl's face to make an identification: a mottled green skirt and a burgundy-coloured blouse told him all he needed to know. He'd been looking at those very same clothes only yesterday afternoon.

He felt suddenly very tired and disheartened as he called down to Dr. Dabbe, “I don't know her surname, Doctor, but I'm very much afraid that her Christian name is Hortense. She's French …”

FIFTEEN

Collutoria
—
Mouth-washes

“I don't like it, Sloan,” snapped Superintendent Leeyes. “I don't like it at all.”

“No, sir,” said Sloan. That reaction, at least, had been predictable.

“The Allsworthys'
au pair!
You're quite sure, aren't you, Sloan?”

“Quite sure, sir.”

“She's dead, of course?”

“No doubt about it, sir, I'm afraid.” Detective Inspector Sloan didn't like the murder of Hortense either. He didn't like murder at any time—if a policeman did he should be out of the force—but this one had implications far beyond the ordinary …

“How?” barked the superintendent.

“Probably manual strangulation, Dr. Dabbe thinks.” Of all lethal weapons two human hands left almost the least trace of all.

“When?”

“Dr. Dabbe said it was too soon for him to say.” Sloan granted that a damp ditch wasn't the easiest setting in which a consultant pathologist could exercise his professional judgement and was personally prepared to await a calculated answer to that question.

The superintendent drummed his fingers on his desk. “If she's from Braffle Episcopi,” he growled, “why does her body turn up beside the main road between Calleford and Berebury?”

It was Inspector Harpe who had supplied Sloan with the answer to that question. Happy Harry and the men of Traffic Division had at once sped out to the spot where the murder victim had been found, in an endeavour both to keep the traffic moving and to let those with duties at the scene have somewhere to park their vehicles. Police photographers—let alone forensic pathologists—did not take kindly to using shanks' pony.

Sloan drew breath and tried to convey the information as cogently as he could to his superior officer. He hadn't really got time for this sort of dialogue. “There's a really long natural curve on the road there, sir, which has got a good enough run into it at each end for someone parked where it bends most of all to have time to punt a body into the ditch with the driver's own car giving the maximum cover. If the road was clear both ways before you started you'd have time.”

Leeyes grunted.

“There's even a bit of a lay-by there …”