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Crosby got no further. Detective Inspector Sloan brought
one of his hands into the palm of the other with a loud smack in what he was later to describe as a light bulb moment. ‘That’s it!’ he exclaimed softly. ‘Of course. I should have thought of it before.’

‘Thought what, sir?’

‘What William Shakespeare told us. He said “Consumptions sow in hollow bones of man”.’

‘Beg pardon, sir?’ said Crosby, even more bewildered.

‘The car, Crosby,’ Sloan snapped, springing to his feet. ‘Now!’

‘Still no sign of Enid coming back,’ said Marilyn Potts over at Captain Purlieu Plants. ‘I’ve just rung her house in case she’s got home after all and could give her precious talk herself tonight but there was no reply.’

‘She’s probably stuck on a donkey in Petra,’ said Anna Sutherland.

‘Not Petra,’ said Marilyn. ‘She’s been there. Not enough flowers for her in Jordan, anyway. Now, if you’d said she was marooned on a mountain in Anatolia, that would be more likely.’

‘It wouldn’t surprise me,’ said Anna darkly, ‘if she was one of those vandals who pinch rare seeds while they’re there.’

‘Wrong time of the year for seeds,’ said Marilyn ambivalently.

‘Rare plants, then. Have trowel, will travel. Don’t
you remember that unusual cyclamen she brought back last year from above the tree-line somewhere in Turkey?’

‘I don’t know if Customs look in sponge bags,’ said Marilyn doubtfully, ‘but I wouldn’t put it past them.’

‘And I wouldn’t put it past Enid to try to smuggle something interesting back here and then ask us to grow it on for her. Goodness knows why she doesn’t have a greenhouse of her own.’

‘Greenhouses,’ declared Marilyn, ‘need watching. And don’t we know it,’ she added mournfully.

‘Our Enid never misses a trick,’ said Anna. ‘Not never.’

Marilyn Potts gave a great sigh. ‘And now I must make a few notes for the Staple St James people tonight.’

‘You don’t need any notes, my girl. You could talk about orchids standing on your head. And all evening too.’

‘But not necessarily the ones we’ve got in the shed for tonight. Enid must have ordered those six special ones from Jack Haines for a reason. I’ll have to try to work out why.’

Anna Sutherland gave one of her high cackles. ‘Don’t you start on the language of flowers.’

‘Why ever not?’ Marilyn giggled. ‘If it came to that, I could always send Norman a bouquet of lobelia.’

‘Malevolence,’ interpreted Anna. ‘Good thinking.’

‘Mock orange …’

‘Deceit,’ said Anna.

‘And bilberry,’ said Marilyn.

‘Can’t remember,’ admitted Anna.

‘Treachery.’ 

‘Just the job,’ concluded her friend. ‘That’s him – malevolent, deceitful and treacherous. And don’t we know it.’

‘Do get a move on, Crosby,’ urged Detective Inspector Sloan.

‘Yes, sir. Of course, sir.’ Crosby had followed Sloan at a dog trot out to the police station’s car park and into their police car. ‘Where to, sir?’ he asked as he started the car’s engine.

‘Berebury Hospital and don’t hang about.’

Had it not been for the set look on his superior officer’s face, Detective Constable Crosby might have been inclined to retort that he never hung about when at the wheel but one glance at the expression on Sloan’s countenance was enough to ensure that he stayed silent as the car ate up the distance between the police station and the hospital. At one point he was tempted to ask what the hurry was all about but he held his tongue. After a few minutes he was rewarded with a terse explanation.

‘What I want to do, Crosby,’ said Sloan, ‘is to get to the hospital before they put the admiral under.’

‘I see, sir.’ The constable pressed his foot down on the accelerator a little more firmly.

‘They’ll be giving him an anaesthetic any minute now so they can set his leg and I must talk to him first.’

‘I’m sure, sir,’ said Crosby. He made a token pause at a roundabout, cutting in neatly ahead of a sports car to the manifest surprise of its young driver.

‘And I’m sure of something else,’ murmured Sloan,
more to himself than to Crosby. ‘But I need to know for certain.’

Detective Constable Crosby waited until more of the road had slipped by and then ventured a question. ‘Is it important, sir? I mean, seeing the admiral now.’

‘Anaesthetics can do funny things to the memory and also,’ he added caustically, ‘can be a gift to the defence.’

‘Am I being a bit slow, sir?’ Crosby asked humbly.

Detective Inspector Sloan essayed a small smile. ‘I think that in the motoring sense, Crosby, that would be a first but we’re not talking fast cars now, are we?’

‘No, sir.’

‘And you’re not being slow. If anyone’s been slow it’s me. It’s the admiral’s leg that’s broken for no reason and without pain that’s made me remember.’

‘Remember what, sir?’ Crosby caused the police car to round a blind bend with impeccable respect for any cars that might have been oncoming and straightened the vehicle up at just the right moment afterwards.

‘Timon of Athens.’

‘A Greek gentleman would that be, sir?’

‘No, Crosby, just a character in a play.’

‘But with hollow bones, I think you said.’

‘He was a man with many friends. Too many friends,’ Sloan said ambiguously, as some more of the play came back to him. It had been a youthful schoolmaster who had seen fit to bring it to the attention of a group of pubescent boys in a lesson called ‘Relationships’ but really to do with the facts of life: the dangerous ones. English literature had had nothing to do with it; sexually transmitted diseases everything.

‘You can’t have too many friends, surely,’ objected Crosby, who found it difficult to make them, based as he was in modest lodgings.

‘It depends on the friends,’ said Sloan dryly.

‘In Athens, were they, these friends?’

‘What? Oh, no, just in this play by William Shakespeare called
Timon of Athens
.’

Detective Constable Crosby promptly returned his whole attention to the steering wheel, while Detective Inspector Sloan went back in his mind to when he first heard that bit of the play read out. It was the shape of the admiral’s nose that should have told him in the beginning. What was that quote? ‘Down with the nose, down with it flat, take the bridge quite away.’ The admiral’s nose had had no bridge.

‘Which door, sir?’ asked Crosby, swinging the car through the hospital entrance gates with a flourish and bringing it to a standstill in a bay marked ‘Ambulances Only’.

‘This will do,’ said Sloan, leaving the constable to find out for himself whether the authority of a policeman on duty ranked higher than that of an ambulance man with a patient on board. Once inside the hospital, though, and presented with a long direction board, Sloan wasn’t sure where to go next. As far as he was concerned it was a
toss-up
between ‘Orthopaedic’ and ‘Geriatric’ wards.

Opting for the orthopaedic ward, he was met at its portals to his relief by a woman in nursing uniform. In Sloan’s experience people in uniform had the weight of authority behind them and as a rule knew what they were doing. This one admitted to having a patient called Waldo
Catterick in her care and certainly knew what she was doing.

This was refusing to let him onto her ward. ‘Until visiting time,’ she said flatly, ‘and then only if the patient is feeling like visitors.’

‘It is important that I see him before he is operated on,’ said Sloan. ‘Very.’

‘It is important that he has his premedication before then,’ she countered, adding in an acidulated tone that mocked his own, ‘very.’

‘Really important,’ he pleaded.

This she showed no sign of responding to.

‘Please, sister,’ he said.

‘I really cannot have a patient disturbed at a time like this,’ she said austerely, the majesty of the nursing profession meeting the majesty of the law head on.

He tried another approach. ‘Not even if it’s a matter of life or death?’

The distinction between the two was obviously less important in the medical world than the police one since it cut no ice with a ward sister accustomed to daily matters of life or death. She said, ‘It is important that the patient goes to the operating theatre in a calm state of mind and,’ here she gave a minimal smile, ‘I cannot imagine that a visit from the police could be other than unsettling.’

It wasn’t, thought Sloan, so much a case of irresistible force meeting immoveable object as of Greek meeting Greek. He decided on a different – and definitely duplicitous – ploy. ‘I could always arrest him,’ he said to the ward sister, even though he wasn’t sure that he could.
He made to take a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket. ‘Neither you nor anyone else, sister, can stop me doing that in the performance of my duty as a police officer.’

‘All right then,’ she conceded, yielding very reluctantly, the majesty of the law prevailing over the Florence Nightingale ethos at last. ‘I’ll give you a minute or two with the patient. No longer, mind. And don’t upset him.’

It was all he needed.

Admiral Waldo Catterick was lying on the bed, a pale blue flowered hospital operation gown giving the old sailor an oddly feminine appearance and one quite at odds with his grey beard.

‘There’s something I need to know about Miss Enid Osgathorp,’ said Sloan without prevarication.

A pair of china blue eyes stared back at him. ‘A nasty piece of work,’ responded the admiral without hesitation.

Sloan pulled up a chair and sat down beside his bed. ‘Tell me why. I need to know.’

The old man gave him a shrewd look. ‘Will it stay between you and me?’

‘I’ll do my best but I can’t make any promises.’ There were other, higher, authorities than his and truth – the whole truth – came into their reckonings well ahead of such trifles as personal privacy, career and reputation.

The beard lifted and fell, signifying its owner’s understanding of this. ‘She tried to blackmail me about having had what we called one of the venerable diseases,’ he said. ‘Oh, not directly but I knew quite clearly what she meant.’

‘They were old in history,’ offered Sloan. This much he did know. And he knew too, that judgements were for the
courts, not the police. And perhaps – who knows? – to Saint Peter.

‘Oh, they’re treatable now but it wasn’t so easy in my day, Inspector. You’re too young to remember.’ He shifted slightly in the stiff hospital bed and then went on, ‘I caught a dose of the clap out east when I was a young man and it’s on my medical record. And,’ he added dryly, pointing to his broken leg, ‘you might say that I’m now paying the wages of sin.’

The young schoolteacher had skirted round most of these in his talk on relationships but Sloan could see some of them embodied in the patient before him now.

‘That was enough for the Osgathorp woman, of course,’ he said. ‘She knew, all right, and could prove it.’ He sighed. ‘Every nice girl loves a sailor. That was the trouble.’

Detective Inspector Sloan tacitly agreed with him. ‘And now, Admiral, she’s been missing for three weeks, which is our problem.’

‘She’ll turn up,’ said Waldo Catterick. He echoed an old hymn. ‘Jesus can’t possibly want her for a sunbeam.’ Something approaching a grin crossed his weather-beaten face. ‘You’re too young to remember that expression too.’

‘I should have worked out where the woman was getting her information from before,’ said Sloan, concentrating on the job in hand.

‘It shouldn’t surprise you in my case,’ said Catterick frankly. ‘All admirals have been midshipmen once upon a time, you know, just as all bishops have been curates in their day.’ 

‘What did you do about it?’ asked Sloan, leaving aside this nugget of conventional wisdom.

‘Took the tablets.’

‘I mean, about Miss Osgathorp.’

He gave a high laugh just as a nurse approached with a tray with a hypodermic needle on it. ‘Like the Duke of Wellington, I told her to publish and be damned.’

‘But she didn’t,’ said Sloan, eyeing the nurse and getting to his feet to go.

‘Of course not, Inspector. Then everyone would have known what she was up to with everyone else’s medical records at her fingertips, wouldn’t they? It would have quite spoilt her little game and I counted on that.’ The blue eyes twinkled. ‘I was right too.’

‘But you didn’t tell us that she had attempted to blackmail you so that we could have done something about it,’ pointed out Sloan astringently.

‘Then everyone would have known, wouldn’t they?’ said the old man simply.

‘Just a little prick,’ said the nurse, advancing with her hypodermic syringe at the ready.

Sloan left hastily before the admiral could catch his eye.

‘So every single patient on the doctor’s list at Pelling could have been being blackmailed by this woman?’ barked Superintendent Leeyes back at the police station. ‘Is that what you’re trying to tell me, Sloan? And not very clearly, if I may so.’

‘Theoretically, sir, but actually it would only be worth her while …’

‘If it was her, remember,’ intervened the superintendent.

Only the prospect of the Annual Assessment and his Personal Development Discussion coming up very soon stopped Sloan from quoting Erasmus in the matter of going where the evidence led – another kernel of wisdom brought to his attention by his philosophical old Station Sergeant. Instead he went on, ‘Quite so, sir. That being so, obviously there would only be any point in her trying it on with those who knew or had reason to believe that there
was something discreditable on their medical records.’

‘But we don’t know who they are, do we? That it?’

‘We don’t know yet, sir,’ said Sloan patiently. ‘And we have no idea how many there are of them either.’ He’d been running over in his mind his own medical history, hoping that it didn’t have anything in it worse than acne. Mind you, as he remembered, that had seemed very shameful at the time. Prompted by this thought, he went on, ‘And we don’t know at this stage exactly what medical information there could have been on their records that made them vulnerable to blackmail.’

‘Plenty, I daresay, human beings being what they are,’ said Leeyes, a natural cynic if ever there was one.

Detective Inspector Sloan, experienced police professional that he was, could only agree. He didn’t need a statistician to tell him that quite a large percentage of the population had something to hide. He knew that already.

The superintendent drummed his fingers on his desk. ‘But that woman, Enid Osgathorp, would have known all about their little medical foibles by virtue of having access to their records. That’s what you’re telling me as well, isn’t it?’

‘If it was her, sir,’ he said, tongue in cheek.

‘I take your point,’ said the superintendent loftily.

‘And I’m very much afraid that at least two people weren’t like the admiral and didn’t refuse to play ball.’ He was tempted to add that it took two to tango but thought better of it.

‘And therefore presumably paid the price of silence instead?’ said Leeyes.

‘Just so, sir. Two people who didn’t tell her to publish
and be damned, anyway.’ There had been something engagingly straightforward about the old sea-dog at Pelling. Sloan hoped the operation on his hip was going well.

‘Two, you said?’

‘The SOCO reported that there are signs of two separate break-ins at Enid Osgathorp’s house after she’d left it.’

‘Looking to see if she had evidence of their weaknesses there,’ concluded Leeyes, who was wont to equate illness with culpability – and always with failure. ‘And finding it, do you suppose?’

‘I don’t think that there would have been any evidence there to find,’ said Sloan, who had been thinking about this. ‘She didn’t need evidence. Such that there was would have been on their medical records anyway or Enid Osgathorp wouldn’t have known about it. Presumably the records – hard copy or computer – were safe enough from anyone else.’ He hoped that this was true. The records were in government hands, which, he thought realistically, wasn’t by any means the same thing as being safe from prying eyes. ‘The victims would have only needed to be sure that she was aware of their medical histories. They wouldn’t have needed proof because they, too, knew it would be there – written on their records.’

‘And they themselves naturally knew them, as well, of course,’ said the superintendent, stroking his chin, a sure sign that he was thinking too. ‘So there wouldn’t have been any question that she hadn’t got her facts right.’

‘Exactly, sir.’ Sloan coughed. ‘There is, though, the
possibility that they wanted to be sure that there was nothing in her house that led directly to them.’

Leeyes shuffled some papers about on his desk. ‘And are you telling me that one of the people who broke in has killed her?’

‘All that we know for certain,’ Sloan said steadily, ‘is that she’s been missing for three weeks now and that we can’t as yet trace her whereabouts. Of course we now also know that some person or persons unknown would seem to have a motive for silencing her.’

‘Do you have anyone else in your sights, Sloan? Besides the two unknown breakers and enterers of her cottage, I mean?’

‘Not the vicar’s wife, anyway,’ he said. ‘She was dead before Enid Osgathorp is said to have left – did leave – but I’m fairly sure she had been one of her victims.’

‘Wonder what she’d been up to?’ Leeyes asked, with something approaching a grin. ‘Mrs Beddowes, I mean.’

‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure, sir,’ said Sloan austerely. He paused and then said, ‘Benedict Feakins is still up to something but I don’t know what.’

‘Then find out,’ commanded Leeyes automatically.

‘He seems to be short of money, which could be accounted for by blackmail, and he shied away like a frightened pony when Enid Osgathorp’s name was mentioned. But he doesn’t strike me as having the bottle to do away with a kitten, let alone an elderly party, although,’ he added fairly, ‘desperate men can be driven to take desperate actions.’

‘He was one of those who lost plants at Jack Haines’ nursery too, wasn’t he?’ mused Leeyes. ‘So, you said, did
that old admiral. What you need to be looking for, Sloan, like Charles Darwin, is the missing link.’

‘Sir?’

‘The one between the missing party and all those dead orchids.’

‘There may not be one.’ Charles Darwin had known there was a missing link before he started looking for it. Sloan did not.

The superintendent swept on. ‘There was someone else too, whose plants were damaged …’

‘A couple called Lingard,’ supplied Sloan. ‘No sign of any financial pressure there but there wouldn’t be anyway.’

‘Why not?’

‘The wife’s got money so it wouldn’t easily show up if she’d been shelling out to the Osgathorp woman.’

Leeyes thought about this for a moment. ‘What about those two women at the nursery at Capstan Purlieu? Where do they come in?’

‘They lost plants all right, although they didn’t seem to have been growing them for specific customers so we couldn’t explore that aspect further. I would have said there was no money there for a blackmailer anyway, besides which they’re blaming a disaffected husband. I’m going to interview him as soon as we can locate him.’

Superintendent grunted. ‘Anyone else?’

‘The nurseryman Jack Haines – he lost plants too, of course; quite a lot of them, including a greenhouse full of orchids. He seems to have got something on his mind but I don’t know exactly what. It could be blackmail too.’

‘Sounds as if someone doesn’t like him either,’
commented Leeyes. ‘Wilful damage to those greenhouses must have a reason.’

‘Yes, but we don’t know what it is. Any more than we know why the orchids at Capstan Purlieu were trashed. Anthony Berra says he doesn’t know either why his plants should have suffered – we’re seeing him again next. Haines’ stepson, who is also the former husband of one of the women at Capstan Purlieu, is the only one in the frame for the greenhouse jobs so far. But as I said we haven’t caught up with him yet.’

‘It’s about time you did,’ said Leeyes. ‘And found out if the missing person had any connection with him or Jack Haines.’ He bared his teeth at something approaching a smile at an impeding witticism. ‘We can’t have anyone leading us up the garden path, can we?’

‘No, sir,’ said Sloan, taking this as his leave to depart.

‘We’re going back to Pelling next, Crosby,’ announced Detective Inspector Sloan to the waiting constable, ‘to have another chat with the last person admitting to having seen Enid Osgathorp alive.’

‘So far,’ said Crosby elliptically.

They found Anthony Berra in the garden at Pelling Grange. The Lingards were out but he was still working on the new border. ‘I’m just getting the frost tolerant plants in,’ he said, kicking some soil off his spade. ‘This business at Jack Haines’ greenhouses has really knocked my planting plans back.’

‘I’ll bet,’ said Crosby, who didn’t know his crocus from his Crocosmia. ‘Big job you’ve got on here,’ he added, looking up and down the long bare stretch of ground.

‘Too right, I have,’ said Berra.

‘Just a few questions, sir,’ said Sloan.

‘Fire away.’

‘There were three women waiting at the bus stop but you only picked up Enid Osgathorp.’

Anthony Berra wrinkled his brow. ‘You didn’t know our famous Miss Osgathorp, did you, Inspector? It looked to me as if the other two did because they stepped back when she got into my car. It seemed that they weren’t too keen to join her.’

‘Not popular?’ So far, Anthony Berra would appear to have been one of the few people not to have openly criticised the missing woman.

‘To put it kindly, Inspector, I think the power of being the gateway to the doctor sometimes went to her head.’

‘Power corrupts,’ observed Crosby. He started to say something in that connection about his superintendent until quelled by a fierce look from Sloan.

Berra threw him an amused glance. ‘So they say,’ he murmured.

‘But she knew you well enough to get into your car?’ persisted Sloan.

‘She knew my bad chest even better,’ the young man said wryly. ‘And that my cough isn’t infectious, which everyone else seems to have difficulty in believing.’

‘Can we just run over what happened next?’ said Sloan. ‘You said you went to the bank and had lunch at the Bellingham. What else did you do?’

‘What I always do when I go into Berebury – trawl through all the charity shops.’ He grinned. ‘I collect old gardening artefacts and that’s where you find them – if
you’re lucky. I picked up a Victorian dibber there once and my collection’s never looked back. You’d be surprised at what turns up in those sorts of shops.’

Detective Inspector Sloan, a policeman and thinking like one, made a mental note that these days while most High Street shops had automatic tills which recorded the time and nature of all transactions, your average charity shop was staffed by elderly and probably unobservant volunteers. He was about to ask for more details of Berra’s shopping trip when his personal phone rang.

It was the Division’s Chief Scenes of Crime Officer Charlie Marsden, sounding quite excited. ‘I’ve just heard back from Forensics about those items we collected from the Feakins’ at The Hollies. Guess what else was in the remains of that bonfire?’

‘Surprise me, Charlie,’ said Sloan.

‘I bet I will,’ chortled Marsden. ‘Fasten your seat belt.’

‘Go on.’

‘Cremated ashes. Forensics weren’t quite sure but they thought it was a full set, so to speak.’