An April Shroud (12 page)

He spoke, Dalziel noted approvingly, as if to be some kind of writer was the equivalent of being physically handicapped.

'You know a lot about these people, Sergeant,' he said.

'I did a bit of research when this last business occurred,' said Cross. 'You heard about it?'

'You tell me,' said Dalziel.

Cross opened his file.

'The deceased, Conrad Fielding, was discovered by his wife in what they're calling the Banqueting Hall at Lake House. Unfortunately by the time we became involved the body had been moved, but according to Mrs Fielding's statement the man was lying on the floor there - ' he passed over a glossy half-plate print of the Hall floor on which an outline of a body had been chalked ' - with his chest pierced by the bit of an electric drill. The drill was still switched on. There was a ladder lying alongside the body, and there were drill marks in the wall about twenty feet up. It seems that the building contractors had packed up work till they got paid and Mr Fielding had been trying to do it himself. The coroner decided that the ladder had slipped, he'd fallen down with the drill in his hand with the switch locked on, and unfortunately had fallen right on to the bit. Three-eighths doing two thousand four hundred revs. It makes a hole like that.'

'I'd have expected it neater,' said Dalziel, looking at the close-up of the naked chest on a mortuary slab.

'The bit stayed in the wound after death,' said Cross. 'The weight of the drill would force the bit sideways through the flesh till an equilibrium was reached. That's what the doctor said. Here's the p.m. report.'

Dalziel scanned it quickly, expertly. He usually left it to his subordinates to extract what was important from technical reports and relay it to him succinctly and accurately. But Cross had not been moulded on the master- potter's wheel.

'So,' he said. 'Accident. What's your interest?'

'We've a duty to investigate all sudden deaths, sir,' said Cross blandly.

'Get knotted,' said Dalziel amiably, ‘If I fell off this chair and broke my neck, you wouldn't dig into my family history for the past thirty years. So?'

'There were a couple of things,' said Cross slowly. 'First, the way they all behaved. They're an odd lot up at Lake House, you may have noticed, but you'd have expected a bit of, well, respect. Instead they all chattered away, ten to the dozen, and seemed bent on carrying on just as normal, except that they were a bit annoyed at the disturbance. Mark you, I didn't see any of them till some time after the death, so I can't report on immediate reactions. Mrs Fielding seemed a bit distressed, but very much in control, and the boy, Nigel, seemed genuinely upset. But the others . . . well!'

'Even the old man?'

'Old Hereward? He was the oddest of all. No sign of grief but he said, "I told him no good would come of it. I told him," and that was all. Not another word.'

Dalziel glanced at his watch. He was running out of time.

'You said there were a couple of things which aroused your interest. What else besides the family reaction?'

'There was a phone call,' said Cross. 'Not to us, but to the insurance company carrying Fielding's policies. One of their investigators, Spinx they called him, came round to tell us. Co-operation, he called it. What he was after was for us to tell him they needn't pay up! Evidently someone rang up their office the day after the death and said they should look very closely at the circumstances before handing out any money. Well, we have to take notice.'

'Male or female?' demanded Dalziel.

'A woman, they think, though it could have been a male falsetto. Look, sir, can I ask if you're on to something? I mean, I don't want to sound as if I'm telling you your job, but it is
my
case.'

Cross stared at him defiantly. He's quite right, thought Dalziel. Being his superior gives me no right to act in a bullying, arrogant way.

'Just curiosity, lad,' he said with a disarming grin, showing teeth which were as perfect and as reassuring as a shark's. 'I might be spending a couple of days with these people and I wanted to know what I was getting into. From what you tell me, there's nothing to worry about. There's always someone ready to make nasty phone calls. And as for their reactions, well, we're all entitled to be different, aren't we? It'd be a grey place if all folks were the same.'

With these tolerant, liberal colours tacked to his masthead, Dalziel prepared to set sail through the door.

Cross reassembled his file and said casually. 'You don't happen to know if they are still going to open the restaurant a week on Saturday, sir?'

'No. I'm sure they'll do their best,' said Dalziel, never less sure of anything in a life of certainties.

'I hope so. I'm in the local Bowls Club and we've got a booking. There's ten quid of my hard-earned cash in that concern.'

'There's better things to do with your money,' said Dalziel reprovingly. 'But I'm sure Mrs Fielding will try to honour all commitments.'

He must have sounded a little defensive. Cross looked at him and said neutrally, 'She's a fine-looking woman, Mrs Fielding.'

Dalziel felt his tolerant, liberal colours slipping.

'What's that got to do with anything?' he said.

'Nothing at all, sir. Just thinking it's a pity her life should have been so full of tragedy. Two husbands, both lost in such nasty circumstances.'

It was a question he should have asked. Had he been in Cross's position investigating the business from scratch, it was one of the first things he would have looked to discover.

'How did Percival die?' he asked.

'An accident on the lake, sir,' said Cross. 'He fell out of a punt and was drowned.'

9

The Setting of Riddles

Dalziel moved swiftly once he had left the police station. There was one more call he had to make and he was short of time. Fortunately his destination was only round the corner from the station as he had ascertained in the chemist's.

He glanced quickly around when he reached the entrance to Gibb and Fowler's builders yard. The street was deserted except for a man entering a telephone-box about thirty yards behind him, and he pushed open the rickety wooden gates and went in.

It would have been simpler and more professional to get Sergeant Cross to do this, but for reasons he was still keeping obscure from himself, he did not wish to alert the local force more than he had done. Basically, he assured himself, it was just his own curiosity that was driving him on.

He was lucky to find the small, lop-sided and halitotic Mr Gibb in, or so the small, lop-sided and halitotic Mr Gibb assured him. Dalziel expressed his joy at such good fortune and tried to arrange Mr Gibb and himself in one of these curiously oblique conversational tableaux so favoured of television drama directors. Mr Gibb, however, would be satisfied with nothing less than confrontation so Dalziel produced his warrant card and came quickly to the point.

'Mr Gibb, why did your firm stop work on the job at Lake House?'

'It's no secret,' said Gibb. 'They'd got no money. We're not a charity, Superintendent. When I found out they couldn’t pay for what we'd done so far (which was nearly the whole job, I might add), I saw no reason to chuck good money after bad.'

'I see that,' said Dalziel. 'But you were so near finished, why not complete the job and give them a chance to make some money? You must have known they were short of capital for a long while.'

'You're right, we did. And that's the way we
were
thinking until, well, we got information suggesting that even if the place was finished, they didn't have a cat in hell's chance of getting the business under way. It would just mean they had a better-looking concern to sell off when the official receiver got to them, and I saw no reason why I should spend more time and materials just so other creditors could get a better dividend! So I said, if you don't pay now, that's it.'

'I see,' said Dalziel, releasing his held breath. 'You say you got information. How did you get it?'

Gibb looked uncomfortable, then said aggressively. 'It was a phone call. Some woman, anonymous. I wouldn't take notice of such a thing normally, but we'd been worried about that Fielding fellow for some time. You know the type, good talker, very convincing, gets you full of confidence till you go away and think things out a bit later. Know what I mean? So I thought I'll put him to the test, ask for a payment on account. Well, he started his usual patter. Mind you, it wasn't up to his usual standard. I mean, normally he could have talked the pants off a nun, but this time he seemed stuck for words. Perhaps it was his conscience.'

'Perhaps,' said Dalziel thoughtfully. 'So you stopped work. Would you start again if there was some money forthcoming?'

'Yes,' said Gibb without hesitation. 'Like a shot. We’re short of work just now. It's general. Six weeks ago, I was never in the office. Now, I'm never out of it.'

'You said I was lucky to catch you,' said Dalziel slyly.

'I thought you might be a customer then,' grinned Gibb through his ruined teeth. 'What's this all about anyway? Is there something up?'

'Not really,' assured Dalziel. 'Do me a favour, Mr Gibb, and don't let on I've been asking questions. You never know, you might be back on the Lake House job sooner than you think.'

That should keep him quiet, thought Dalziel as he left. The poor devil was probably down to his last Rolls-Royce. He strode back along the street, moving quickly for a man of his bulk.

I'm far too fat, he thought. I've let myself go. This belly's obscene. They'll need a domed lid on my coffin, like a casserole.

But it did have its uses sometimes. Like now, for instance, he thought, as he opened the door of the telephone-box and stepped inside, pinning the slightly built middle-aged man in the ill-fitting suit against the coin box.

'Right now,' said Dalziel. 'Who the hell are you?'

Even as he spoke he recognized the man. On the night he had been assaulted by Louisa in the Lady Hamilton it was this fellow who had come into the bar, asking about the disturbance. He had placed him then as a journalist. Whatever he was, it was probably this brief encounter which had made him familiar enough to stick out when Dalziel had got out of Bonnie's car in the square. Dalziel did not believe in coincidence and when the same man had been hanging around near the police station and subsequently near the builders yard, it bore investigation.

'What the blazes are you doing?' demanded the man. 'Let me out at once, or I'll call the police.'

'I
am
the police,' said Dalziel. 'So you needn't call too loud. Why're you following me? Come on, quick as you can!'

'The police? So it's you. I didn't realize. My name's Spinx. Hold on.'

Spinx tried to reach into his top pocket but Dalziel never took chances and his great paw closed firmly on the man's wrist.

'What've you got there?'

'Just a card,' said Spinx, very frightened now.

Dalziel reached into the pocket, took out a business card and sighed. It was a sad business, this suspicion. But it might have been a razor.

Alfred Spinx
said the card.
Claims Department. Anchor Insurance.

'Come on, Alfred,' said Dalziel, stepping out of the box. 'Let's walk and talk.'

The open air seemed to make Spinx garrulous. He spoke in a strange not-quite-right accent and idiom as though he had learned English through a correspondence course with some minor public school in the thirties.

'I'm an insurance investigator,' he said. 'I used to be freelance, doing general work, you know. But the bottom's falling out of divorce now. Who needs evidence? Like a lot of dratted gypsies, break a pot and shout I
divorce thee
thrice, and that's it. I've thought seriously of emigrating, you know. By George, I have. To somewhere where they still have standards.'

'Flags, you mean?' said Dalziel wondering whether to take this sodding little twerp for real. 'Try Russia. They like flags there, so they tell me. But before you buy your ticket, why were you following me, Alfred?'

Spinx stopped and stared with nervous resolution at Dalziel.

'Excuse me, Mr . . . er . . . ?''Dalziel. Superintendent.'

'Superintendent. I'd rather you didn't use my Christian name. I've studied a bit of criminology and I know it helps to establish a proper subordinate and familiar relationship with a suspect, but you know who I am now and I'd prefer to talk at the level of equals. We're colleagues in a sense after all, don't you know, you in the public, me in the private sector.'

The words came at a rush and Dalziel's first impulse was to laugh. But the man's attempt at dignity was not merely comic. In any case Dalziel wanted information and wanted it fast. He should be in the coffee shop now.

'I'm sorry, Mr Spinx. It is
Mister
? Good. But just a few questions if you'd be so kind. What precisely is the case you're working on at this moment.'

'The same as you, I imagine, Superintendent,' said Spinx. 'Mr Conrad Fielding's death.'

'Why should that interest you?'

'Any insurance company looks closely at any large claim on it, you must know that. We're probably even more suspicious than the police.' He spoke with pride.

'And there was the phone call,' prompted Dalziel.

'Yes. You'd know all about that, of course. Such things cannot be ignored, you understand.'

'Tell me about it again,' commanded Dalziel.

'Certainly. Wait a moment. Here we are. My book of words.'

He produced a plastic-covered notebook from his inside pocket, thumbed through it, his lips pattering together in time to the riffled pages, finally pursing in a reluctantly proffered kiss as he found his place.

'Here we are. It was a woman who phoned. Or so the oral evidence suggests.
Hello.''

'What?' said Dalziel.

That's me,' explained Spinx. 'I've got the whole conversation.
Hello!
Then she said,
You thinking of paying any insurance money on Conrad Fielding? Well, I wouldn't.
Then I said,
Hello!
I was playing for time, you understand.
Who's that speaking?
She said,
Never mind that. Just ask yourself what a man like that would be doing up a ladder in his condition.
I said
Hello!
and she rang off.'