Stiff News (12 page)

Agnes suddenly became very earnest while Helen, more disturbed by the news, started pacing up and down the library behind him.

‘But Da,' said Agnes, leaning forward and patting his hand, ‘what about your bad heart?'

‘It'll stay the same as it's always been. It's my address I'm changing,' he snapped, ‘not my vital organs.'

Agnes, who would have liked to have said something further about his vital organs, decided to keep the word ‘satyriasis' until she got home. She settled instead for a few pointed remarks about old age.

Her father listened with half an ear. He was attempting to keep his eye on Helen, still distractedly pacing about the library. He tried to spin his wheelchair round to keep her in view. ‘What are you doing over there?' he said irritably. The irritability would have been recognized by any half-baked psychologist as a displacement activity. ‘You know I don't like anything going on behind my back. No soldier ever does.'

‘Just looking,' said Helen, feeling suddenly rebellious. From now on there would be no need to play the subservient daughter ever again.

‘Well, come where I can see you,' he ordered.

‘They've got everything here, haven't they?' Helen said, looking round the walls, and not moving, ‘except shrunken heads.'

‘I dare say,' said her sister drily, ‘they ought to have some of those, too.'

‘One, anyway,' said Helen.

‘So,' said Walter Bryant, affecting not to have heard this, ‘I've arranged for Miss Ritchie – Margot – to come in this morning to have coffee with us so you can congratulate her and hear about our wedding plans.'

Agnes drew in her breath sharply but her father was already looking at his watch. Before she could speak he said, ‘She'll be here any minute now…'

But meeting Miss Ritchie just at this minute was something his daughters could not bring themselves to do. They left immediately without farewell kisses.

*   *   *

Berebury Police Station was a relatively quiet place on Saturday mornings. Like birds of prey, evildoers tended not to rise too early in the day. Avian raptors need rising thermals of spiralling hot air in which to soar above their quarry – malefactors seek darkness and a tired waning of attention in their potential victims. Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby were therefore sitting in an almost empty canteen. They were drinking tea and concentrating on a list.

‘If you ask me,' said Crosby, ‘they go to that Manor and forget to die.'

‘Not this lot,' said Sloan, tapping the paper. ‘These are the ones who went there and did die.'

Crosby sniffed. ‘I dare say, sir, but you can't say that any of them were exactly knocked-off in their prime, can you?'

‘We can't say that any of them were knocked-off at all,' retorted Sloan with some asperity. Jumping to conclusions was something a properly professional detective constable should have learned by now not to do. That way led to miscarriages of justice on a grand scale – and compensation on an even grander one. ‘Not even Gertrude Powell.' He paused and said thoughtfully, making a mental note, ‘Especially not her.'

‘But…'

‘These,' Sloan waved the paper at him, ‘are just the names of all eight of the residents of the Manor who have died in the past three years, starting with a Lionel MacFarlane.'

‘Knocking-on, all of 'em,' insisted the constable, ‘even if they weren't knocked-off.'

‘Their ages,' said Sloan grandly, ‘have got nothing to do with it. A crime is a crime is a crime.'

This was Sloan's own private adaptation of Gertrude Stein's famous syllogism ‘A rose is a rose is a rose.' He'd been very taken by this statement when he'd seen it plastered all over a catalogue from his favourite plant nursery. He'd given it quite a lot of thought while trying to make up his mind between buying a new
Rosa banksiae
or another Picasso rose bush.

Crosby's brow furrowed into a deep frown of incomprehension as he drained his mug.

‘A victim is always a victim,' said Sloan. He didn't think Crosby would understand the connection with roses even if he explained it to him. The constable wasn't an inveterate rose grower and Sloan was. This was no accident. There weren't very many recreations open to a busy detective inspector liable to be called back to duty at the drop of a hat – or the raising of a weapon – but growing roses was one of them.

Crosby's brow cleared a little.

‘And if any of these people on this list have died unnaturally then they are still victims,' said Sloan, raising a hand in salute to his friend and colleague Inspector Harpe of Traffic Division, who had just come into the canteen. Now, Harpe's hobby was keeping tropical fish. Fish didn't mind being left. Like roses, they waited.

‘You wouldn't think it'd matter so much, all the same,' said the voice of youth sitting opposite him. ‘All these people over at Almstone must have been going to die very soon anyway, if not sooner.'

‘And,' carried on Sloan, undeterred by this tempting philosophical byway, ‘whoever brought about their deaths…'

‘If they did,' Crosby put in a caveat.

‘If they did,' agreed Sloan, ‘is still a murderer.'

Detective Constable Crosby plunged his face into his mug of tea and said slyly, ‘Even if, sir, it was their own doctor?'

‘Ay,' thought Sloan privately, ‘there's the rub.' Shakespeare had put his finger on it, all right. The beneficent action, the best of intentions, the greatest good for the greatest number … a flood of half-remembered, half-thought-out justifications tumbled into mind, some of them relics of courtroom battles. The extent of what could be found to be said in mitigation by defence counsel always came as a surprise to him – and probably to the accused, too.

The trouble was that none of the arguments was conclusive – satisfactory, even. Not even his own personal belief that actions taken in malice ought not to succeed. And what about that tricky one – bad action taken with bad intent that had a good outcome? He didn't know. He was only a policeman.

Aloud he said, ‘That, Crosby, is what the doctors call the defence of the double effect.'

‘Really, sir?'

‘The general idea is if the doctor is only setting out to kill the pain, then death is only a side effect.'

‘More tea, sir?' Crosby interrupted this disquisition. ‘Before we start chasing up that list.'

‘What's that?' Sloan jerked back to the here and now. Some things were better left to the moralists. ‘Oh, yes, thank you.'

He was not deceived. Crosby's way to the canteen counter – and his way back – would let Inspector Harpe become aware of his presence. Harpe was known throughout the Calleshire Force as Happy Harry on account of his never having been seen to smile. His contention that there never was anything in Traffic Division at which to smile was only likely to have been reinforced by Detective Constable Crosby's best efforts to join it.

Sloan turned back to the names of those who had died at the Manor.

They read like a roll-call of the Scottish army at the Battle of Flodden plus camp followers. The only name that meant anything to him was that of Maude Chalmers-Hyde; she whom Dr Browne had suspected of dying too soon. He must tell Crosby to get hold of copies of the death certificates of all the others – and the balance sheet of the Manor. The wisdom of always ‘taking a look at the accounts' was something born of hard experience.

Many a showy outfit, Sloan had good reason to know, was without financial substance; many an unobtrusive enterprise was backed by big money. He'd have a look at the Manor's Trust Deed while he was about it. Grateful patients might have left them money and indigent ones been hastened on their way. The other side of the coin in more ways than one, you might say …

‘Your tea, sir.' Crosby interrupted his thoughts by plonking the mug down on the table with a vigour that splattered drops of hot liquid – if nothing else, their canteen tea was always hot and wet – all over the list of those deceased.

‘You're in luck, Crosby,' observed Sloan pleasantly.

‘Sir?'

‘I'm going to give you the time to do out this muster list again.' Inspector Harpe, Sloan was happy to see, had not allowed Crosby to catch his eye as he passed.

‘Yes, sir.'

Sloan pushed the damp sheet of paper back to the constable. ‘Anything else you can make of this lot?'

Superintendent Leeyes might not be in the police station but he had made his presence felt by leaving a wordy memo about the importance of immediately reporting to him the results of their morning's investigations.

‘More women than men,' said Crosby at once.

‘Women live longer. Even at the Manor –' Sloan pulled himself up with a jerk. He mustn't jump to conclusions either.

Crosby shrugged his shoulders. ‘Old soldiers must be getting pretty thin on the ground now anyway. Long time no war,' he said, submerging Korea, Malaya, Northern Ireland, the Falklands Campaign and the Gulf War without a second thought – to say nothing of those notoriously dangerous military exercises, peacetime manoeuvres.

‘I think the Super will want a little more than…'

Crosby waved his hand airily. ‘Don't worry, sir. He won't be in this morning.'

‘No?'

‘On duty on the domestic front,' said Crosby. ‘His wife makes him take her to the supermarket Saturday mornings. He doesn't get to play golf Sundays otherwise. Didn't you know, sir?'

‘No,' said Sloan, considerably entertained, ‘and how, may I ask, do you?'

‘It's my landlady,' said the constable. ‘She sees them there. She says Mrs Leeyes is a real tartar.'

Detective Inspector Sloan could well believe it. He'd seen the Superintendent's wife himself – a short, thin, shrewish woman with a tongue like a whiplash. At the police station she was uncharitably credited with being the reason for her husband's irascibility. Sloan found it oddly comforting that his boss shouldn't be in charge at home. Now, that was one thing he, Christopher Dennis Sloan, didn't have to worry about … Suddenly a vision of the rose catalogue came unbidden into his mind. The choice between
Rosa banksiae,
a very vigorous climber which could reach thirty feet, and the rose bush Picasso, a two-foot-high shrub, had eventually come down in favour of the smaller rose. Their suburban garden, his wife, Margaret, had pointed out with gentle persistence, wasn't really quite big enough for such vigorous climbers.

He stood up abruptly, scraping his chair on the floor. ‘Come on, Crosby, let's go and see what this lot got up to in the war.'

The Regimental History of the Fearnshires was full of names familiar to the two policemen but attached to much junior ranks. The Judge figured as a mere Captain while Peter Markyate and Donald Tulloch had been Second Lieutenants. The account of the Tinchel written in the dry words of the professional military historian was in its way even more stirring than any amount of emotional purple prose would have been.

At Wadi el Gebra, A Company of the 3rd Battalion of the Fearnshires, under the command of Major Lionel MacFarlane, had held out against heavy odds. Captain Calum Gillespie had led a secondary decoy action …

‘That's the Judge,' remarked Sloan.

‘Crafty, even then,' opined Crosby.

… while Lieutenant Walter Bryant, although severely wounded, had acted with extreme gallantry in defending the Company's position.

‘Got it in the legs,' said Crosby, who had been known to complain about the rigours of the beat.

Second Lieutenant Peter Markyate had led the break-out of the encirclement.

‘You wouldn't have thought he had it in him, would you?' said Crosby.

‘That was then,' said Sloan.

And, ran the history, Second Lieutenant Hector Carruthers …

‘He must have been the husband of the woman who arrived the day before yesterday,' said Sloan, reminding himself to have a word with her. She had obviously known the Brigadier, at least of old.

… had distinguished himself in action. Other casualties had included Captain Roderick Forbes, wounded …

‘Where, I wonder,' murmured Sloan, shutting the book, ‘was our Hamish MacIver at the time or Mrs McBeath's husband?'

‘Search me,' said Detective Constable Crosby helpfully.

Chapter Thirteen

When they, pale captives, creep to death

Lionel Powell came away from the telephone at his home in suburban Luston shouting, ‘Julia! Julia! Where are you?'

Julia winced. Noise didn't help her headache. ‘Here,' she called unsteadily.

He made towards the direction whence the sound had come and found his wife sitting at the kitchen table nursing a cup of black coffee in both hands, her ample figure crammed untidily into a jumper and skirt.

‘What's wrong?' she asked. She looked as if she had slept in her clothes, although he knew she hadn't.

Lionel Powell tightened his lips. ‘I really don't know what's going on over at the Manor.'

‘What does it matter?' she asked. ‘After all, your mother's gone now.'

‘Of course it matters, my dear.' Not for the first time, he experienced an involuntary pang of sympathy as he looked at his wife. She was a woman who somehow contrived to look raddled without having enjoyed – except now and then – the excesses of life.

‘I don't see why.'

‘But,' he said aggrievedly, ‘I couldn't get any sense out of them at all. They sounded completely at sixes and sevens…'

‘I expect they're still worrying about that silly letter of your mother's.'

‘And I only rang to say we were on our way over to collect that amulet thing of Mother's and hand it over to Captain Markyate—'

He was interrupted by his wife. ‘I said you should never have given it to the Manor.'