Stiff News (16 page)

What was stranger still in Sloan's view was that the Judge appeared to have lost a great deal of his tremulousness. Aged totterton he might still be, but his hands were much steadier than they had been the day before and his voice noticeably firmer.

‘It was a very old coat,' the Judge added mildly. ‘And like me, Inspector, it's been around for a long, long time.'

‘It is now a very damaged one,' said Sloan.

While Sloan bearded the Judge in his own room, Detective Constable Crosby had been sent to summon police reinforcements from Berebury.

‘It was practically worn out anyway,' said the Judge deprecatingly. ‘It's no great loss.'

‘Which makes the attack on it even more curious,' said Sloan firmly. He had been particularly anxious to be the very first person to talk to the nonagenarian about an ancient coat – and a missing elderly lady.

‘It does indeed, Inspector.' The Judge's expression was quite fathomless.

‘And we should like to know why.'

‘Yes, of course, Inspector. I quite understand that.'

‘What I don't understand, sir,' countered Sloan in a voice pregnant with meaning, ‘is quite why someone should take it into their heads to cut an old coat to pieces.'

‘Nor I,' said the Judge blandly.

‘Your old coat…'

‘My very old coat…'

‘Practically shredded, you might say…'

‘Shredded, eh?' Gillespie sounded positively spry now. ‘How very curious.'

‘I do understand, though,' Sloan forged on, ‘that this particular coat had recently been mended for your ninetieth birthday.'

‘Yes, indeed, Inspector. It was quite restored for me. Wasn't that thoughtful?'

‘Who by?' The sentimental side could wait.

‘I think you might say it amounted to a conspiracy.'

‘A conspiracy?'

‘Shall we say then,' the Judge's lips twitched into something approaching a smile as he searched through his memory for the right phrase, ‘by a number of the residents here acting in concert.'

‘How?'

‘Well, the Brigadier devised various ploys to keep me out of the grounds and therefore not needing my coat.' He chuckled. ‘I only worked out afterwards how he had been diverting me whenever I showed signs of wanting to take a constitutional in cold weather.'

‘And?'

‘I am told that after Mrs McBeath had worked on it – she's the needlewoman here, you know – Captain Markyate wore it into Berebury and left it at the cleaners.'

‘I see.' Detective Inspector Sloan noted that the Judge was able to mention Mrs McBeath's name without a quaver. ‘And then?'

‘Miss Ritchie – that's Walter Bryant's lady friend – collected it and delivered it back here under cover of darkness.' He looked rather wistfully at Sloan and said, ‘She still drives, the lucky woman. And lucky Walter.'

‘Quite,' said Sloan drily.

‘Dowries come in all shapes and sizes these days,' said the Judge, ‘only it's the car that's coming with the bride and not the other way round.'

‘The coat…' said Sloan.

‘Ah, yes,' he said urbanely. ‘The coat. They presented it to me with a nosegay which Miss Bentley had made up. Judges, you know, used to be presented with a nosegay in olden times when they came to court to ward off infection. Gaol fever and so forth.'

‘It's always been a risky job,' said Sloan. There had been something, in judicial history about the gift of a pair of white gloves, too, but he couldn't call the exact details to mind. Not at this moment.

‘I thought it was very thoughtful of them,' said Gillespie. ‘There's not a lot that you can give a man my age that he hasn't got already or doesn't want.'

What Sloan wanted were facts.

‘Was there something hidden in the coat?' asked Detective Inspector Sloan, wondering if he was going to get a lecture on the asking of leading questions.

Calum Gillespie's lips twitched. ‘A
diarium secretum?
No, Inspector. All I may have had there was a list of residents and former residents – oh, and my library list. Books,' he added blandly, ‘are a great comfort when you get to this stage of life.'

‘It would be very helpful at this stage, sir,' said Detective Inspector Sloan formally, ‘to know if you have any enemies.' He hadn't got his notebook out yet but it was there, ready.

‘All judges have enemies, Inspector,' he wheezed. A faint note of surprise came into his cracked voice. ‘You should know that.'

‘Any enemies at the Manor,' said Sloan steadily. One of the many wise things he had learned at his old Station Sergeant's knee had been the importance of not being frightened of judges.

‘You mean they might be doing injury by proxy,' the old man mused, ‘attacking my coat instead of sticking pins into a wax figure?' He stroked his chin. ‘Now that is an interesting concept.'

‘It doesn't answer my question, though, sir, does it?' Something else that that same wily old sergeant had drummed into him had been to be wary of anyone who responded to a question with a question of their own. Doctors did that a lot.

‘Perhaps not,' the Judge sighed. ‘Since the coat has absolutely no intrinsic value, Inspector, I must regretfully conclude that the choice lies between an outbreak of gesture politics or the damage being the work of a mind deranged.'

Sloan tried another tack. ‘And which would you think the more likely?'

‘Malice or madness? I've no idea at all, Inspector.'

‘Perhaps, then, sir,' said Sloan, who himself was thinking along the lines of a more businesslike ‘means, motive and opportunity', ‘you might care to offer an opinion on why Mrs Morag McBeath has gone missing this morning.'

‘God bless my soul!' he exclaimed, sitting bolt upright in his chair. ‘Morag McBeath! But she isn't even ill.'

*   *   *

‘The last person I should have expected to get lost,' said Captain Markyate, visibly stricken. ‘Poor old Morag.'

Detective Constable Crosby had encountered the Captain on the drive in front of the Manor after Markyate returned from his abortive search of the further part of the grounds. Markyate declared he had seen nothing and nobody out of doors save Hazel Finch, who had told him she was just slipping down to the village shop. She would ask there if anyone had seen Mrs McBeath.

‘How come Mrs McBeath was the last person you'd have thought would go missing?' asked Crosby, who had yet to master some of the finer points of questioning a witness.

‘She was one of the youngest residents here, Constable, that's why.' Somehow Markyate seemed more positive in the open air. ‘And very fit for her age.'

Crosby frowned but kept silent. Political correctness had been added to the burdens of today's police officer and he wasn't at all sure where ageism came into all this.

‘She didn't marry Charlie McBeath, you see, until well after the war,' explained Markyate.

Where the detective constable came from, so to speak, the younger the woman the more likely she was to have met a violent end, but he did not say so. Instead he said that he didn't see what her age had got to do with Mrs McBeath getting lost and did the Captain?

‘No, no,' said Markyate hastily.

‘What would you say, then, had got to do with it?' asked Crosby a trifle naively. He had been sent on his way to set up an incident room for a large-scale search. But all information was grist to a detective's mill: Detective Inspector Sloan, for one, was always saying so.

Captain Markyate stood uneasily on the gravel, shifting his weight first from one foot then to the other. ‘Blessed if I know,' he said eventually, for once sounding almost animated. ‘Someone's playing very dangerous games around here…'

‘Dangerous games usually mean high stakes,' said Detective Constable Crosby feelingly, ‘but not always.' It wasn't so very long ago that he had flatly refused to abseil down the cliffs at Kinnisport in aid of a police charity. That game was not worth a candle.

‘And risk and reward are usually linked,' murmured Captain Markyate, adding almost to himself, ‘except perhaps by the military authorities in times of war.'

‘You saw action, sir?' asked Crosby, a little shyly. That, he knew, was what separated the men from the boys, and always had.

A grim little half-smile played round the Captain's lips. ‘I don't think there's a man at the Manor who didn't, Constable. That's the whole trouble here.'

‘And were you, sir,' asked Crosby, still unusually diffident, ‘at that Tinchel or whatever they call it at Wadi el Gebra?'

Markyate nodded. ‘Indeed, I was. It was very nasty. We were completely surrounded and under continuous fire. In fact, I still wake in the night and wonder … I dare say we all do.'

‘Wonder what?'

‘How we got out at all.'

Crosby suddenly remembered he was first and foremost a detective; a mind scarred might be a factor in an investigation. ‘Do any of you here suffer from that post-traumatic stress syndrome that they're always talking about?'

‘All of us who were there suffer from shell-shock,' said Markyate diffidently, ‘but only some of us complain of it.'

‘Who were there then and are here now?' asked Detective Constable Crosby.

‘All the men,' said Markyate, ‘and the widows of some of them.'

‘Mrs McBeath?'

‘No. Her husband was on the Staff.'

‘Mrs Forbes?'

‘Yes.'

‘The new lady?'

‘Mrs Carruthers? Yes. Her husband was there.' He closed his eyes, the better to read his memory. ‘We'd been re-formed, you know. The second battalion had been practically wiped out at St Valéry.'

‘Mrs Powell?'

‘Her, too. Donald Tulloch had been gazetted to us just before we went into action.' Peter Markyate winced. ‘It was a terrible baptism of fire. Terrible.'

Detective Constable Crosby, who had never experienced a shot fired in anger, searched for another phrase he'd once heard. ‘And what about survivor guilt?'

Peter Markyate smiled tolerantly. ‘Oh, yes, Constable, some of us suffer from that too.'

‘If it was me,' said the constable simply, ‘I would have been glad I'd survived.'

‘I wonder if you would,' murmured Markyate. ‘It might, you know, even be one of the places where your risk and reward come in.'

‘We in the detective branch,' said Crosby grandly, ‘call the motive the “reward” and we'll be looking for the reason why Mrs McBeath has taken off.'

‘I'm sure you will,' agreed Markyate gravely. His tall asthenic figure seemed to be tiring now.

‘And by the time we find her,' said Crosby with all the confidence of youth, ‘I dare say we'll know all the answers. Now, tell me which parts of the grounds you've covered and where I'll find the Brigadier…'

*   *   *

‘A what?' howled Superintendent Leeyes down the telephone line from distant Berebury.

‘A dirk,' said Sloan. He couldn't see – but could sense – the Superintendent's rising choler. ‘It's a sort of Scottish dagger with a long blade,' he added lamely. Leeyes must have finished the Saturday morning shopping run, because he had been at home when Sloan had rung him. Perhaps it was the possibility of missing his Sunday morning golf round that was upsetting him so much. He was a great one for complaining that he always got all of the kicks and none of the ha'pence, was the Superintendent.

‘Sounds as unlucky as that Scottish play nobody's supposed to mention by name,' commented Leeyes.

‘It's missing from the library,' Sloan informed him, ‘here at the Manor.'

‘Just like Mrs McBeath,' the Superintendent said ominously.

‘I'm afraid so, sir.'

‘A dirk doesn't sound like a very good book to me,' remarked Leeyes.

‘More of a memento, I think, sir.' It had been hanging on the wall next to a curious relic with anthropomorphic overtones from the Ashanti Wars but Sloan didn't think it was necessary to mention this.

‘Am I,' demanded the Superintendent rhetorically, ‘now supposed to say “Hoots, mon”, and make other Scottish noises?'

The only noises Detective Inspector Sloan, working policeman but also a live human being, had wanted to make were anxious ones about Mrs McBeath's present whereabouts.

And safety.

‘You don't need me to remind you, Sloan,' said Leeyes, ‘that stab wounds are always more dangerous than they look.'

‘No, sir.' It was a lesson learned early and well on the beat but one always impossible to teach young men who were ‘jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel'. Sloan had long ago decided that each generation had to get its own feet wet in the matter of knives. ‘What I'm afraid of, sir, is that whoever's got that old weapon knows all about stab wounds already.'

Leeyes grunted. ‘Better check, then, that there's no one out and about who might have ideas of his own about what to do with strange Scottish knives.'

‘Yes, sir.' Sloan would have been one of the first to admit that so-called ‘Care in the Community' had added a new dimension to some police work. Their Assistant Chief Constable, very much the graduate police officer, always referred to that sort of care as
soi-disant
but Sloan had been too busy to find out why. ‘The Matron here can't think of any reason why Mrs McBeath should have wandered off.'

‘Talking of reasons, Sloan,' Leeyes said, ‘have you come up with any to account for that other old party thinking she had been done to death yet?'

‘Not yet, sir.' He was going to have to sit down soon and think about what could be considered worth the horrors of killing and being killed for. It wouldn't be easy. According to the poet the only things worth the labour of winning had been laughter and the love of friends. Half a lifetime in the police force had made Sloan doubt that as motives went laughter and the love of friends ranked very high on the scale but he could be wrong about that … he'd been a member of the constabulary long enough now to know that he could be wrong about anything. Or everything. Certainly about the death of a bedridden old person such as Mrs Gertie Powell. Or any old person …