Passing Strange (20 page)

And so it was.

Burton opened it at the second page and ran his eye down the column – past Parsnips, Peas (ten pods), Potatoes (white), Potatoes (coloured) to Shallots (exhibition) and Tomatoes (six, outdoor).

‘First prize,' read Norman Burton to himself in the quiet of his own dining-room, ‘Mr Kenneth Walls.'

He looked swiftly at the names of the second and third prizewinners. Mrs Eleanor Wellstone's entry was not even placed. Her tomatoes had certainly never been awarded the first prize. The path of the Secretary of the Horticultural Society – never an easy one – had become positively stony. Harvey McCurdle hadn't made a mistake at all. Someone had switched the labels on the entries.

Human nature had its seamy side.

A lifetime in the schoolroom had taught Norman Burton that.

It had also taught the schoolmaster not only how to look for trouble, but where. Just as he had dismissed Harvey McCurdle from his considerations so now he also excluded Mrs Eleanor Wellstone. The Derek Turlings of this world might use furniture polish to bring out a greater shine on their competition apples, the Mrs Wellstones, anxious, tentative and unskilled, would never resort to switching prize labels to bring greater glory unto themselves. It was altogether too short term for an adult mind.

He knew several young gentlemen, though, who might do just that for pure devilment. He thought carefully. From the Olympian heights of Headmastership he ought at least to be able to narrow the field.

There was the youngest Carter boy: born to trouble. There was Mark Smithson, whose mother's turns had to have a cause. Mark Smithson was cause enough for any mother to have turns. There was Peter Pearson, Fred's grandson. Norman Burton hoped it wasn't going to turn out to be Fred's grandson.

He sat at his dining table for a little while longer, his mind running without effort from memory down the school roll. There were other likely candidates for criminality but they were still down in the lower forms. There were one or two Infants that it would never surprise him to see behind bars eventually but they were scarcely of a height to reach across a trestle table yet. And this sort of prank went with a certain age.

He put a meticulous question mark beside Tomatoes (six, outdoor), methodically replaced his Show papers in order, said goodbye to his wife and walked out into Almstone village.

“What I want to do,” said Sloan as the police car reached the Priory, “is to reconstruct the crime at the scene.”

It never did any harm. If nothing else it brought the investigator nearer to the mind of the victim – to say nothing about the mind of the murderer.

He was convinced of only one thing as he left the car and started to walk across the Priory garden in the direction of the old stables where Madame Zelda's tent had been. That sure conviction was that detection was not a contemplative art. It was all very well for Sherlock Holmes and his proponents to grade the difficulty in solving a problem by the number of pipes of tobacco the great detective took to smoke while he reached a correct solution. Sherlock Holmes didn't have Police Superintendent Leeyes breathing down his neck.

Only gentle readers.

“It looks different today,” said Crosby.

And the Grand Panjandrum himself (‘with the little round button at top') did, after all, have Dr Watson. He, Detective-Inspector Sloan, only had Detective-Constable Crosby. It was at moments like these when Sloan wondered if the ‘detective' component of that designation was more of a courtesy title than an accolade of achievement.

Another thing that made him quite sure that detection was not a purely contemplative art was the amount of legwork involved in cases not solved by Sherlock Holmes. A lot of backroom boys were being very busy on this case already. And two backroom girls.

Sloan had arranged that the Canon's widow, Mrs Edith Wylly, should be visited by two lady policemen. No one would ever guess that the angelic-looking Sergeant Polly Perkins could – judo fashion – toss a man to the ground as lightly as she could (and did) whisk an egg. An urgent police interview with the good lady at Calleford was certainly called for before the day was too far advanced – and Polly Perkins was the right member of the Force to be doing it.

Sloan had been duly cynical of the apparent lack of interest in the Priory estate evinced – according to Stephen Terlingham, the solicitor, that is – by Mrs Wylly. In his experience gift horses were seldom examined too closely in the mouth: so far he took Mrs Edith Wylly, sight unseen, with a large pinch of salt. On the other hand the possession of land – especially entailed land – carried certain inalienable responsibilities. Mrs Wylly, clergy widow to boot, came of a generation that would know that.

He would have been more sceptical still had she been younger. He knew, though – he was old enough to have learned that – that by the time some sixty winters had besieged a person's brow their lifestyle was ordinarily a settled thing. Usually all that the middle-aged and – normally – all that the old asked of their manner of living was that it got no worse with the passage of time. Whatever that style of living was, it was the one that they were used to and by then that was what counted with them.

There could be one other good reason why old Mrs Wylly wasn't pressing her suit. That was because she felt that the girl calling herself Richenda Hilary Pemberton Mellows was exactly who she said she was – the only child of Richard Charles Mellows, explorer, and great-niece of Richard Mellows, Brigadier.

“It's not really the same without the tents, is it, sir?” said Crosby prosaically.

They'd reached the piece of ground just in front of the old stables. It wasn't ‘a fair field full of folk' now. It was empty of people. The spot where the Fortune Teller's tent had stood was still marked out with pegs and orange string, though.

“Use your imagination, man,” adjured Sloan briefly. He swept his arm round the now bare site. “Just visualize the poor woman sitting there in her tent waiting for the next person to come in, thinking of something prophetic to say to them.”

“I don't know how they do it every single day in the newspapers.” Crosby went off at a chatty tangent. “Taurus and Libra and that lot. My auntie always …”

Navigation was the only use that Sloan had for the stars: that and an occasional contemplation of them for æsthetic reasons on a really velvety night. Once a man had done his turn on night duty he looked on a clear sky as a policeman's friend.

“Nurse Cooper would have known almost everyone who came in, don't forget,” mused Sloan. “Man and boy, probably.”

He'd never been as far as Greece but he didn't suppose that in its day Delphi had been so very different from Madame Zelda and her crystal ball. Or the Zodiac. You had your gnomic utterance and you made what you could from it.

Or what you wanted to.

“And they'd all know Nurse Cooper, too,” Sloan reminded Crosby. That was something else to be taken into account. Madame Zelda's clothes had been sort of fancy dress parody: not a proper disguise at all. Her homely face had been partly veiled but there mere token subterfuge had ended.

“Bound to, if she'd been in Almstone all those years, agreed the constable.”

Whoever had killed her had known her.

Sloan reached that conclusion without surprise. Time and again he'd heard people ask those theoretical questions about killing unknown Chinese. If, the hypothesis ran, you could press a button, kill an anonymous Chinaman and collect a million pounds to do what you liked with, would you do it?

Sloan had never heard anyone say they would.

Perhaps, instead, if you asked a person if they would kill someone they knew in cold blood for smaller sums there would be more takers. Sloan had known several. Sometime soon he hoped he was about to be able to confront another.

Crosby was still looking round. “She'd started telling fortunes at two-thirty when the Show opened. They said there was a bit of a rush to begin with …”

Nostradamus appealed to everyone to begin with.

“… then it eased off,” said the detective-constable.

“The Mellows girl said she went in between three o'clock and three-fifteen, didn't she?” Sloan fished his notebook out of his pocket. “Then, according to her statement …”

Richenda Mellows had written out her version of events in a clear, bold hand, signed it without hesitation and handed it over to Sloan before she, too, had left the Police Station at Berebury.

“… she went off to see the Morris Men dance,” concluded Sloan.

Crosby sniffed. “Funny thing to do, sir, wasn't it, seeing as how Nurse Cooper had just been able to corroborate her claim to the Priory. You'd have thought,” said the constable, “that the first thing she'd have done was gone straight off and told somebody.”

“Too clever,” said Sloan promptly. “That girl's got brains.”

She had spirit, too, but that was another matter.

“Stands to reason, sir,” said Crosby mulishly, “that she'd want to tell somebody.”

“She might have told the wrong person and I reckon she'd worked that out. She didn't know who'd been putting all these obstacles in her way, did she? All she knew,” said Sloan, warming to his theme, “was that she wasn't getting anywhere fast. Not who was stopping her inheriting the Priory. Besides, she wanted to see the Morris Men. She said so.”

“I know, I know,” said Crosby in a resigned voice, “on account of them being an ancient survival from the past too. Like this tribe of Fred Flintstones she and her dad had been living with.”

“Meanwhile,” said Sloan heavily, “someone who has seen her leave Madame Zelda's tent slips in themselves.”

“And says ‘What's new?'” suggested Crosby vividly.

“His very words, I'm sure,” said Sloan.

“Nurse Cooper – all excited – says, ‘It's all right, I can prove the girl's who she says she is.'”

“All innocent, too,” said Sloan soberly.

Crosby nodded. “‘Good for you,' says our friendly neighbourhood murderer. ‘Hang about while I go and find a weapon to kill you with.'”

“Or words to that effect,” said Sloan.

“So off he goes to look for the wherewithal to kill her.” Crosby sketched a quick noose in the air with his forefinger.

“To kill her quietly,” said Sloan, completing the word picture. The thought alone was enough to send a trickle of ice up and down the spine. “It had to be quietly. A scream or a struggle would have been heard very easily, remember. He'd got to think of that.”

“So he strolls round the Show keeping his eyes skinned.”

“It's got to be done quickly, too,” said Sloan. “He hasn't a lot of time either.”

“Before she spills the beans to someone else,” said Crosby: some of the films he saw were very old ones.

“Quite so,” said Sloan sedately.

“Then,” said Crosby, quite carried away with his reconstruction, “in the Flower Arrangements tent he spots this reel of Mrs Millicent Kershaw's wire.” He paused.

“The very thing, he says to himself,” supplied Sloan, since it seemed expected of him.

“Yes. And he picks it up and –”

“No.” Sloan brought the Walter Mitty dream sequence to an abrupt halt.

“No?”

“Don't tell me he's going to risk walking around with that reel in his hand. Someone would be bound to see and remember.”

Crosby paused for thought. “He would have had to have covered it with something or carried it inside something.”

“He would. It was too big for his pocket and he couldn't break off a length in full view of everybody either. I don't know what he put over it or it in but – all right – leave that for now and carry on.”

But the illusionist's spell had foundered on the hard rocks of reality. The constable's spontaneity had all gone. “He brings it back to the tent, sir, hangs out the ‘engaged' sign, breaks off the length of wire he needs and …”

“Well?”

“Kills her.”

“Yes,” said Sloan consideringly, “I think that's exactly what happened.”

Detective-Constable Crosby added something else straight from the celluloid world. “Lynching never takes long.”

“That was why it didn't do,” said Sloan gravely. Retribution was one thing. Over-speedy execution of it was quite another. “Then what, Crosby?”

“He takes the reel back to where he found it.”

“Ah.”

“Only to find Mrs Kershaw's basket had gone. She's put it in the boot of her husband's car.”

“Bully for Mrs Kershaw,” said Sloan absently. “So …”

“So he looks round for somewhere else to park it. Somewhere safe where he can collect it later.”

“He chooses the Fruit and Vegetable Tent,” said Sloan. “We don't know why yet. But …”

“But?” Crosby looked quite blank.

“He couldn't collect it later,” Sloan said. “We know that, too, don't we?”

It didn't seem as if Crosby did.

“He couldn't collect the reel when he wanted to,” expounded Sloan patiently, “because he had to steal it back later on, didn't he?”

Crosby's brow cleared.

“Unfortunately for him,” said Sloan without noticeable pity, “half-a-dozen people had seen it in the meantime.”

Crosby perked up and made his own contribution. “And that let the Mellows girl out, too, didn't it?” he said.

“It did,” said Sloan meaningfully. “Up to a point.”

“Seeing as how she was under lock and key at the material time,” said Crosby. “Our lock and key.”

“Being in police custody is one alibi that does seem to stand up,” murmured Sloan ironically. In his time he'd known a lot of alibis that hadn't done but he'd never known that one to fail yet.

“Unless she's in it with him, sir? Is that what you mean?”

Sloan nodded. Collusion had always been on the cards. “Sometimes,” the detective-inspector said profoundly, “it takes more than one to set up fraud.”