Passing Strange (12 page)

“A good idea, sir,” said Detective-Constable Crosby. He was not sorry to have been detached from the supine form of Richenda Mellows. Fainting girls were not his forte.

“Ah, there we are,” exclaimed Burton. “There's my notebook.”

The notebook was indeed lying exactly where Norman Burton had left it. Of the reel of flower-arrangers' green wire there was no sign whatsoever.

9

Clarion swell

Detective-Inspector Sloan was soon back on the telephone. He was ringing the mortuary this time.

“Weapon,” said the pathologist, “hardly seems the right word to use.”

“Well?” Sloan wasn't interested in playing about with words.

“Let's call it the instrument of death.”

“Instrument of death, then,” Sloan amended his question, and got straight back to the point. “What can you say about it?”

“A length of thin, plastic-coated wire was used to bring about strangulation,” said Dr Dabbe. “That what you wanted to know, Sloan?”

“It'll do to be going on with,” said Sloan evenly. He had other questions for the pathologist but he would bide his time.

“I've got the exact length in centimetres here somewhere for my report …”

“It was long enough for the job,” said Sloan. Like Lady Bracknell he felt that the exactness was immaterial.

“And the tensility,” said Dr Dabbe. Precise facts and accurate measurement were part and parcel of the forensic pathologist's stock-in-trade. “That any help?”

“It was strong enough, too,” Sloan said briefly, satisfied that all the details would come along in black and white on paper afterwards.

“It's got to be long enough and strong enough for the jury as well,” Dabbe reminded Sloan.

“And was it?”

“There were multiple ecchymoses of the conjuctivæ and skin,” said the pathologist with seeming irrelevance.

“Going to blind them with science, are you, then?” said Sloan.

Dr Dabbe ignored this. “There were also several fractures of the cartilages of the larynx and the rings of the trachea.”

“The Defence won't like that either,” forecast Sloan. “They'll make you say ‘voice-box' and ‘windpipe' instead.”

“Then,” said the pathologist warmly, “I shall tell them about the even larger sub-pleural hæmorrhages that I saw on the lungs.”

“Will you?” said Sloan, glad as always that post mortems were not his department – though he had long suspected that the pathologist had become a pathologist because he had feelings.

Not because he hadn't got them.

Sloan had a theory that all registered medical practitioners who took up the speciality of pathology were weak, not strong: that they were frightened of living patients. It wasn't, he was sure, the dissecting-room that sorted out the sensitive spirits. It was the consulting-room.

“Her eyes were bulging,” continued Dr Dabbe, unaware of his train of thought, “and her face was cyanosed …”

“Blue,” interrupted Sloan. He had long ago decided that pathologists were doctors whose emotional armour had been tested – and pierced.

“And swollen,” swept on Dr Dabbe. As if to demonstrate that if he had ever had any human sympathy he had quelled it long ago, the pathologist added, “Just as well the wire was still there, Sloan.”

“Why?”

“These days most pathologists don't bother to go past the coronary arteries.”

“No, Doctor …”

“There's usually enough in the way of atheromata sitting there to account for sudden death by occlusion,” said Dabbe. “Had you thought about that, Sloan? Nature on the murderer's side.”

“When I was first in the Force, Doctor,” countered Sloan promptly, “we were taught that for ‘gastritis' on the death certificate you could often write ‘poisoning' on the charge sheet.”

“A hit!” agreed Dabbe. “A palpable hit!” There was a sudden change in his tone. “The only thing that was missing, Sloan, from the classic picture of strangulation was any bruising from a knot.”

“No knot,” said Sloan, making a note.

“No mark of a knot,” said Dabbe more precisely, “and no sign of a knot in the wire I found round her neck. She had a thin scarf on but it hadn't saved her from much.”

Sloan pulled his notebook nearer with the hand that wasn't holding the telephone. “If we produced a reel of wire – the one that we think the piece you've got came from – what could you tell us about it?”

The pathologist thought about the question for a moment. “We could put the two ends under a comparison microscope. That would tell you whether or not my bit had come from your bit, so to speak. That's about all, I think. Let me have it and I'll tell you.”

“Chance,” said Sloan, “would be a fine thing.”

“Like that, is it?” said the pathologist sympathetically.

“Is there anything else for us to go on?” asked Sloan. The case wasn't exactly rich in evidence so far. He didn't count a girl who had fainted at the mention of the victim's death as evidence.

Not yet.

At the moment it was merely a circumstance to add to other circumstances. Like a missing reel of wire. Like a dead District Nurse. Like a speculative builder? He didn't know about Maurice Esdaile yet. He would have to be seen. And soon.

“From the angle of the laceration,” the pathologist answered Sloan's question in a businesslike manner, “I can tell you one thing for certain.”

“Good.” In an uncertain world it was the certainty itself that Sloan was grateful for. He didn't very much mind what it was that the doctor was so sure about.

“That's that she was sitting down when it happened,” said Dabbe.

“What,” he asked reluctantly, “sort of struggle did she put up?”

He wasn't sure that he really wanted to know. If there was one thing that juries were invariably ambivalent about it was their attitudes to the victim's struggles.

And unpredictable.

The Prosecution never seemed sure whether to throw into the balance the evidence of a spirited defence of assault or the equally relevant signs of a helpless submission to superior strength.

Defence Counsel as a rule shamelessly treated the details as so much putty in their hands for the better moulding of a picture of innocence.

Everyone seemed to agree that the struggles of the victim weighed with juries – but which way they weighed on the scale pans of justice was a horse of quite a different colour. If, mused Sloan, hopelessly mixing his metaphors, the Blind Goddess had a blind spot – and perish the thought, said the policeman in him – it was in the matter of the evaluation of an instinctive response to attack versus defenceless inaction.

As in rape.

In no case was she blinder than when the charge – let alone the fact – was rape. It was even a dirty word these days. It must be if the offence itself had been redefined as sexual intercourse without consent.

It was undeniably a help if ‘without consent' was underscored with visible scratches. If the victim hadn't struggled someone from the Defence was always on hand to ask why not. ‘Corrobers', as the legal people light-heartedly called supporting evidence, became vital then.

With the attack on Joyce Cooper there might have been another answer.

“Struggle?” said Dabbe. “She wouldn't have had much of a chance to struggle, Sloan. It would have all been over very quickly.”

“Yes.” Sloan had heard that argument offered in mitigation by those who snared rabbits with thin wire.

“She wouldn't have felt anything at all for long,” said the doctor.

Sloan had heard that sentiment, too, advanced before.

By a variety of villains: and vivisectionists.

Euthanasia – easy death – voluntary or involuntary – human or animal – wasn't an argument.

Sloan cleared his throat. Speculation and imagination weren't the province of the forensic scientist but there was no harm in asking the doctor what he thought had happened.

“I think,” said Dr Dabbe without hesitation, “that whoever killed her simply stood behind her and pulled. It would have been enough.”

“Someone she knew, then,” concluded Sloan.

It was a thought that never failed to chill him.

Cedric Milsom and Edward Hebbinge walked up to Abbot's Hall Farm together.

“Millicent ought to know about that wire before the police arrive,” said Hebbinge.

“Too right,” grumbled Milsom. “Wish I hadn't dropped by at the Show this afternoon myself. The police are bound to be asking who all were there.”

The Priory agent glanced curiously at the farmer. Hebbinge knew that Cedric Milsom's latest lady-love had been helping at one of the stalls and Eileen Milsom, too, would have known that as well as anyone. It had been noticeable over the years that her devotion to horses had increased in direct proportion to the wanderings of her husband's roving eye.

Herbert Kershaw ushered the two new arrivals into his office.

“It's really Millicent we've come to see,” began Hebbinge.

“There's a sporting chance,” explained his farming neighbour bluntly, “that someone used her flower wire to kill Nurse Cooper.”

“Something of Millicent's?” Herbert Kershaw's usually florid face took on a distinctly lighter shade. “Good God!”

Cedric Milsom waved an arm. “The stuff she uses for her floral art arrangements.”

Kershaw's face took on a grim look. “We'd better ask her, hadn't we?” He went to the door of his office and shouted, “Millicent! Come here. I want you.”

“I left it lying in my flower trug,” she said when they had explained.

Her husband stirred restively. “I don't like the sound of this at all.”

“Where did you leave the trug?” asked Hebbinge.

“At the back of the flower tent,” said Millicent Kershaw. “Behind one of the trestle tables.”

“Anyone could have found it there, then,” intervened Kershaw triumphantly. “Couldn't they?”

“Someone did,” said Milsom flatly.

“There was a spare table behind the exhibits,” continued Mrs Kershaw as if no one had spoken. “I left some extra flowers and my floral scissors there too. And then when Herbert came down with the car I put the trug in the boot.”

Edward Hebbinge said “With or without the wire?”

“I'm afraid I didn't notice.” She hesitated, looking from one face to the other. “Is it important?”

“We don't know,” said Hebbinge.

“It's got my name on it,” she said.

“We know that,” said Milsom immediately. “We all saw it.”

“That's why we're here,” said Hebbinge more smoothly.

Her husband opened his mouth to speak.

“The reel's gone,” said the Priory agent. “That's the trouble.”

“Norman Burton put it on one side,” Milsom told them, “but someone took it.”

“Again,” said Millicent Kershaw harshly.

Edward Hebbinge met her eye. “Again,” he said.

“So it was taken twice, was it?” said Superintendent Leeyes, metaphorically draping himself in purple.

“It was,” agreed Sloan. “Once from the tent where Mrs Kershaw had left it and once from where Norman Burton had marked it.”

“For safety,” said Leeyes tartly.

There were some people who were temperamentally unsuited to the receiving of unpleasant information. Police Superintendent Leeyes, Sloan was convinced, was one of them. At the moment he was working his way through the classic progression from denial to anger and from thence on to despair. The fourth and final stage listed by the textbooks on psychology – detachment – he hadn't reached yet.

Sloan sighed.

If past track performances were anything to go by, he wasn't going to reach it for a long time either.

Not Leeyes.

Some people reserved this sort of reaction for what Shakespeare had called ‘stiff news'.

Not Leeyes.

So far, all that Detective-Inspector Sloan had told him was that he had Richenda Mellows all right but that he didn't have a reel of thin green wire. It hadn't been enough to save him from the boiling hatred earmarked for the messenger of unhappy tidings.

“Do you mean to say,” Leeyes barked crisply down the telephone, “that you let it slip through your fingers, Sloan?”

“I didn't have my hands on it, sir.”

Predictably – as a plea in mitigation – this failed with the Superintendent.

“That reel must matter,” boomed Leeyes at once. “You realize that, don't you, Sloan?”

Sloan said he realized that.

Even Crosby had realized that.

“Otherwise it wouldn't have gone,” pronounced Leeyes.

Sloan said that he realized that, too. He added, “We think perhaps there might have been fingerprints on the cardboard end of the wire.”

Leeyes grunted. “It was an unpremeditated business, then.”

That, too, was a fair conclusion.

“Fingerprints left on what might have been used to kill Nurse Cooper,” said Sloan cautiously, “would certainly point that way.” Since every modern child learned at its mother's knee about fingerprints they seldom got left at the scene of a crime any more. “It wasn't,” he added, “the weather for gloves.”

“A woman could have worn them,” said Leeyes promptly. “Especially at a flower show.”

The Superintendent was an old-fashioned man in some respects. Sloan forbore to say that at a village flower show – save for the Member of Parliament's wife – the wearer of gloves would have been as conspicuous as the fat white woman whom nobody loved who walked through the fields in them …

The one sartorial ensemble that gloves most definitely would not have gone with on a high summer's day in England was blue denim jeans and a shaggy brown woollen jacket.

That brought Sloan to the next item likely to upset the Superintendent.