Stiff News (17 page)

Or any old person … A limerick learned long ago danced into Sloan's mind from the depths of his subconscious memory. ‘There was an old person of Basing, whose presence of mind was amazing…' He pulled himself up with a jerk. ‘I'm sorry, sir, I didn't quite catch what you were saying.'

‘I said,' repeated Leeyes impatiently, ‘that you'd better check on all the men at the Manor. You never can tell with “soldiers from the wars returning”.'

‘Very true, sir,' said Detective Inspector Sloan, placing the quotation without difficulty from last winter's evening course on ‘The Poetry of War'. He decided against saying that you never could tell either with a missing old lady and an arcane – and absent – weapon.

It wasn't a combination he, for one, liked one little bit.

Chapter Seventeen

See where the victor-victim bleeds

Asked a question about the absent dirk the Matron wasn't able to be specific about the timing of when she had last seen it. This should have been a help. In fact, all it did was worry Detective Inspector Sloan even more.

‘It wasn't there in the library this morning, Inspector,' she said. ‘I'm sure about that.'

‘When?'

‘When I took Mr Bryant's two daughters along there,' she said. ‘I went through with them both to the library myself because I was a little concerned that in their father's present condition an overemotional visit from his daughters might overtax him.'

‘What condition?'

‘He's got a bad heart as well as the leg injuries he got in the war which put him in his wheelchair.'

‘Ah.' If there was one thing which every policeman knew it was that families were bad for every medical condition, but especially for heart ones. Legs were less important.

‘He told me he planned to tell his two daughters about his proposed remarriage over coffee in the library,' said Muriel Peden.

‘Brave man,' commented Sloan.

‘And that he'd also arranged for Miss Ritchie to join them all after he'd broken the good news to them.'

‘Even braver,' observed Sloan.

A faint smile crossed Mrs Peden's face. ‘He was brave enough at their famous Tinchel where he was wounded. The others have all told me so many, many times. So,' she added with an attempt at lightness, ‘a domestic encounter shouldn't have held too many terrors for him.'

‘Perhaps not.' In wartime, though, a man at least usually knew where the enemy lay. The placing of minefields and tank traps on the home front was never quite so straightforward. Sloan would have been the first to advise against any family meeting so very tightly structured. Asking for trouble, he would have said that was.

‘But he did realize,' she admitted, ‘that his daughters might not welcome the news.'

Sloan said he'd never met any adult daughter – married or single – who had ever welcomed the idea of her father's remarrying. Glad tidings they never were, however troublesome the old man was. ‘I suppose,' he added doubtfully, ‘that it's a sort of reverse Oedipus complex or something.'

‘That's much too deep for me, Inspector,' the Matron responded firmly, ‘but I am sorry that I can't remember when I last saw that dirk there. Yesterday, perhaps. Or the day before.' She smiled wanly. ‘Yesterday was quite a day.'

Sloan said, ‘Tell me about the dirk.'

‘In its way, it was quite striking – for one thing, it was well over a foot long covered in a sort of basket-weave design and decorated with studs, to say nothing of the regimental crest.'

Sloan nodded. That was something a woman would have noticed. Especially a woman who did tapestry work.

‘There would have been quite an empty space on the far wall had it not been there,' she insisted. ‘I wouldn't have missed that.'

‘It sounds quite a weapon…' said Sloan. The size and shape of the dirk – and, more significantly, its absence – were only some of the many things which were worrying him now.

‘Well, it definitely wasn't there before his two daughters came,' she insisted. ‘I didn't see the going of them myself. Nor, now I come to think of it,' she added, looking a little puzzled, ‘have I seen Mr Bryant's Miss Ritchie arrive yet.'

Detective Inspector Sloan raised his head sharply at that. ‘Then we'd better soon find out what has happened to her, too.'

Muriel Peden gave him a quick nod. ‘I was told, Inspector, that she and Mr Bryant plan to get married quite soon.'

That, as far as Sloan was concerned, was something else for him to be worried about. He asked, ‘Is there any connection between Mrs McBeath and Walter Bryant?'

She shook her head. ‘Not that I know about. I understand Mrs McBeath didn't marry until after the war and she's definitely not one of those who go on about the past all the time.'

‘Things not being as they used to be?' suggested Sloan.

‘“Battles long ago”,' murmured the Matron astringently, ‘are what most of the men here usually dwell on, Inspector. Some don't, of course. The Brigadier never talks about the past and Captain Markyate hardly ever. The Judge talks a lot about it but never says anything, if you know what I mean.'

‘And Mrs McBeath?'

She frowned. ‘I'm pretty sure from what the others say that Mrs McBeath's husband wasn't involved in action very much.'

Something from his schooldays came into Sloan's mind, dredged up from a half-remembered lesson on war in ancient history. ‘Go hang yourself, brave Crillon. We fought at Arques and you were not there.' ‘So he didn't have anything to “remember with advantages”?' he said aloud, matching her sentiments. There were those, he knew, who were of the opinion that William Shakespeare had been a soldier. There were those, too, in plenty, who had things to remember with disadvantages – the sufferers from shell-shock, for a start. He'd have to ask Dr Browne about that.

‘I think not,' the Matron said, ‘But you should know, Inspector, that Mr Bryant has already informed us officially that he'll be leaving for good in under a month.'

That at least, thought Sloan, was another fact in a case singularly short of them.

‘We shall miss him at the Manor after all the years he's been here,' she said.

‘I'm sure. Now, what I must do first is see Mrs McBeath's room. But even before that, I want to know all about this coat of the Judge's in the cloakroom…'

Unfortunately in the matter of the timing of the damage to the Judge's coat the Matron was less able to be helpful. She hadn't been in that particular room herself since the morning of the day before, when she'd done a swift round to check that all was in order there before the funeral yesterday morning but not since.

Suddenly, thought Sloan, making yet another note, yesterday seemed a long time ago. ‘Go on,' he said.

‘As far as I can see, Inspector, anyone could have gone in there after that and before Miss Bentley discovered it in its damaged state this morning,' she said. ‘Anyone at all.'

Sloan made another note. At this rate, his notebook would be full of information but still be without a single deduction, logical inference or conclusion in sight. And that wouldn't go down at all well with Superintendent Leeyes.

‘And,' added Mrs Peden, ‘whoever it was who did it could have slashed the coat there without anyone seeing them. They'd only have to lock the door and they'd have all the time in the world.'

‘When was the Judge's birthday?' Sloan fortified himself with the thought that there must be fixed points in every criminal universe.

Muriel Peden's brow wrinkled. ‘About three weeks ago.'

‘So why,' said Sloan as much to himself as to the Matron, ‘has it taken so long for someone to attack his coat?'

*   *   *

Detective Constable Crosby had never darkened ‘Afric's burning shores', and so the similarities between seeking Brigadier Hamish MacIver and tracking a bull elephant on the rampage were quite lost upon him. They were, however, there; particularly in the leaving of a trail of broken branches and waving fronds of vegetation.

Crosby, like any other Great White Hunter, followed a route marked by flattened long grass and trampled twigs, eventually locating his quarry plunging about in the undergrowth surrounding the car park.

‘Any news?' panted the Brigadier, stumbling back to the path in a state of great perturbation. ‘Have you found her?'

‘Not yet,' said Crosby.

The Brigadier, flushed and gently perspiring, adjusted his gammy leg to the hard ground. ‘Who'd have thought it would be Mrs McBeath of all people who would go AWOL?'

Crosby looked quite blank. ‘AWOL?' he echoed.

‘Absent Without Leave,' barked the Brigadier. ‘Didn't you know that?'

‘No.' The only people in Crosby's book who went absent without leave were convicted prisoners or those on remand. Mrs McBeath hadn't even been arrested.

‘Sorry,' MacIver grunted. ‘I was forgetting you wouldn't be old enough to remember. By the time I was your age, my boy, I'd been in uniform for years.'

‘So have I,' said Crosby, sounding injured. ‘Only I'm plain clothes now.'

‘What? What?' he said, and then, changing his tone, ‘Oh, I see what you mean. Well,' he waved his arm over a wide sweep of landscape, ‘I thought I'd better work my way systematically round this side of the house before going further out, fan-wise.' He squared his shoulder and recited a military maxim learned in the field long ago. ‘You should always clear the foreground first.'

‘Yes, sir, I'm sure.' It was the home ground that the police always cleared first. Escaped prisoners usually had, perforce, to head for home. Ten to one, there was nowhere else for them to go for shelter and support. Crosby couldn't begin to imagine where McBeath might have sought succour – if she had – since presumably she no longer had a home to go to.

‘It's only after you've cleared the foreground,' went on the Brigadier, ‘that you can safely advance.'

‘We're waiting for reinforcements,' said Crosby, deciding that two could play the military metaphor game.

‘The trouble with reinforcements,' said the older man bitterly, ‘in my experience, is that they don't always come.'

Detective Constable Crosby was with him there. He himself had got his first black eye in the line of duty for trying to sort out a pub brawl while waiting for help to arrive.

‘Or if they do come,' said the Brigadier, ‘they arrive too late to do any good.'

‘That's what happened to me, too,' said the constable simply. ‘It was all over bar the shouting by the time help got to me.'

‘It was all over bar nothing, I can tell you,' said the old soldier vigorously, ‘by the time they got to Wadi el Gebra.' He narrowed a pair of rheumy eyes at the memory. ‘Nothing except the sandflies, that is. They, like the poor, were always with us in the desert.'

‘That where you got your limp?' asked Crosby.

‘Tripped down some stairs at my club,' said the Brigadier shortly.

‘That Mrs Chalmers-Hyde who died…' said Crosby suddenly.

‘Maude?' said the Brigadier. ‘What about her?'

‘Was her old man in the war with you all?'

‘Not exactly,' said the Brigadier, shaking his head. ‘He was a bit too young at the time for that, but he was in the Army of Occupation after the war and then he was posted to the Control Commission. Why do you ask?'

‘I just wondered,' said Detective Constable Crosby.

They were interrupted by the arrival at high speed of a small car whose driver took the turning into the car park at a thoroughly dangerous rate of knots before coming to a noisy halt immediately in front of the two men.

A younger, more active version of the genus elderly lady than the other women at the Manor stepped out and waved gaily to the Brigadier.

‘Sorry to be late,' she called out. ‘Wretched car just wouldn't start. Had to get a man to fix it. Walter and the girls will be wondering what on earth's become of me, won't they?' She turned in the direction of the Manor. ‘Oh, look. There's Walter now, talking to someone on the drive. He must have been looking out for me. Isn't he a dear?'

The Brigadier grunted non-committally at this, while Detective Constable Crosby said nothing.

Miss Ritchie waved. ‘Walter, this way…'

There was an answering wave from the figure in the wheelchair and the machine started off slowly in their direction, bumping over the gravel towards the waiting three. There was a distinct change in its pace, though, as it reached the top of the downward slope leading to the car park.

Miss Ritchie's expression of welcome and delight changed first to one of consternation and then to one of frank alarm as the wheelchair gathered speed. Gaining extra momentum at every yard, the little vehicle bounced forwards down the hill towards them.

‘Brake, Walter, brake!' Miss Ritchie shouted. ‘You're going too fast. Slow down or you'll crash!'

But braking, it seemed, was something that Walter Bryant could not do. Before the group's spellbound gaze, the wheelchair advanced upon their triumvirate at an ever-increasing rate.

Detective Constable Crosby was the first to come to life. Averting his fascinated stare from the speeding Walter Bryant, he pushed Miss Ritchie out of the line of the approaching machine and jumped himself just as it shot past him. As it rocketed by, its footrest caught the Brigadier just as, hampered by his gammy leg, that old soldier was trying to move to the safety of the bushes.

The next thing Detective Constable Crosby saw was the misshapen form of Walter Bryant describing an uncertain parabola, base over apex, into the bushes. And the Brigadier completely bowled over by a glancing blow from the side of the vehicle.

What the young policeman saw after that – and that only out of the corner of his eye – was the figure of a man hurrying away from the top of the drive.