Stiff News (2 page)

Like Gertie.

Hamish MacIver gave a nostalgic sigh, gripped the sides of the lectern firmly, and began to read aloud. ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,' he said, ‘from whence cometh my help…'

Only the help had never come, not when he had wanted it, two days out of Mersa Matruh in that terrible wadi. All he had seen then when lifting his tired, sand-blown eyes to the hills were enemy tanks. Unbidden as usual, the memory of desert warfare intruded into his thoughts. He strove, as always, to banish the spectre. Cognitive therapy, they called the treatment for shell-shock now. They even called shell-shock something else these days.

Nothing stayed the same any more. Nothing.

‘My help cometh from the Lord,' he read, concentrating on the words in front of him. He'd noticed these flashbacks were happening more and more frequently these days. ‘Which made heaven and earth.'

Perhaps Lionel Powell hadn't come to the funeral today on purpose – making a last gesture of disapproval towards the mother whom he'd always regarded more than a little censoriously. The Brigadier dismissed this possibility almost at once. Not only, until the service had started, had the front pew's two occupants kept on turning to look expectantly towards the south door but, in his book, Lionel didn't have enough spunk to do something like that.

Not Lionel.

Damn silly name to give a boy … Hamish MacIver pulled himself up with a jerk as he remembered why Gertie's son was given the name of Lionel. Only Gertie would have named her son after the most senior officer in the battalion and not her husband. Trust Gertie. She just didn't care. Never had.

‘He will not suffer thy foot to be moved,' read on the Brigadier evenly, ‘he that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep…' At least the psalmist knew what he was writing about – that bit might have been written especially for watch-keepers and … sentries. Don't even think about sentries, the old soldier adjured himself sternly, and certainly not about a foot that moved. Think about something that didn't matter. Think about whether Miss Ritchie was here in the church today and whether she'd contrived to sit next to old Walter Bryant as usual. No power on earth could keep Miss Ritchie out of a church if she wanted to enter it and well she knew it. There was no ecclesiastical law yet about whom you sat next to in church, either, whatever Walter Bryant's two daughters might have liked.

The Brigadier worked his way through the psalm, conscious that at least as far as Gertie Powell was concerned the reading had been a better choice for the occasion than the anthem. The Rector had chosen the anthem – but then the Rector hadn't really known Gertie. Not in her heyday, anyway. Otherwise he wouldn't ever have had all those innocent-looking choirboys up there singing Purcell's famous anthem ‘Thou Knowest Thou, Lord, the Secrets of Our Hearts' while looking as if butter wouldn't melt in their mouths. He, Hamish MacIver, could tell them a thing or two about secrets, all right.

‘The Lord is thy keeper,' declaimed the Brigadier in his customary clipped military tones. ‘The Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night…'

He nearly faltered then. The sun had smitten them all day in the wadi and the moon had brought no comfort at all … With a conscious effort of will, Brigadier Hamish MacIver contemplated the two girls – young women really – in the front pew. One of them looked so like her grandmother that he didn't need to see what her ankles were like.

He could guess.

The other girl had more of the look of Lionel's tedious wife, Julia. Lionel's wife's ankles were no good at all – and the rest of her wasn't much better. And condemnatory with it into the bargain. Not that Gertie had cared about that either.

‘The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil.' He tried to read the rest of the psalm automatically and without thinking about the words. He didn't quite succeed. ‘He shall preserve thy soul. The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in…' Only He hadn't. Not in the wadi. Not everyone. ‘From this time forth, and even for evermore.' MacIver shut the Bible firmly and said, ‘Amen'.

‘Amen,' said the congregation.

The Brigadier found getting down from the lectern more difficult than getting to it had been. Not only was there his gammy leg but there was his arthritis … Matron – Mrs Peden – knew only too well about both disabilities and was watching him from the other side of the church. He could see her out of the corner of his eye looking at him now, as anxious as he was that he didn't fall. He murmured her little aide-mémoire under his breath – the rest of the congregation probably thought he was praying. ‘Up with the good, down with the bad,' he chanted to himself, as he carefully sank his weight onto his wounded leg, bringing the good one gratefully down beside it without disaster. He rephrased the mnemonic. ‘Good foot first to heaven, bad foot first to hell.' That wasn't such a bad sentiment for reciting in church anyway.

Hamish MacIver straightened his shoulders and marched back to his own seat, resolving that as soon as he decently could he'd make his way over to Matron and find out if she knew why Lionel and Julia Powell weren't there at the funeral. She'd know what had happened to them. Bound to. Matron – like all matrons – made it her business to know that sort of thing. Indeed, Mrs Peden always did know everything – well, very nearly everything.

But even Muriel Peden didn't know where Lionel Powell and his wife were. And at that precise moment only a very few people did.

One of those who did know was Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan of F Division of the Calleshire Constabulary.

This was because Lionel and Julia Powell were at the police station in Berebury.

Chapter Two

Are shadows, not substantial things

‘Come in, Sloan, come in,' Superintendent Leeyes was barking through his open door, ‘and listen to this, will you?'

‘Sir?' Detective Inspector Sloan had just dutifully responded to an urgent summons to the office of his superior. With the Superintendent were a middle-aged couple.

‘These are Mr and Mrs Lionel Powell.' The Superintendent waved an arm in the direction of a solemn-looking pair in their early fifties dressed in conspicuously dark clothes. They were sitting together at the other side of the Superintendent's desk. A piece of paper and an opened envelope lay on the desk between the two and the Superintendent. Leeyes said gruffly by way of introduction, ‘Inspector Sloan…'

Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan, known as Christopher Dennis to his wife and family and – for obvious reasons – to his friends and everyone at the police station as ‘Seedy', was the head of the tiny Criminal Investigation Department of Berebury Divison of the Calleshire Constabulary. Such crime as there was in F Division usually found its way onto Sloan's desk rather than the Superintendent's, so this case – if there was a case, that is – didn't fit the usual pattern for a start. He turned enquiringly now towards Leeyes and the two strangers.

‘Say it again,' the Superintendent imperiously commanded the man in the dark suit. ‘Tell it just like you told me.'

Lionel Powell leaned forward and began. ‘My late mother's funeral is arranged for today at twelve noon at St Clement's Church at Almstone.'

Unconsciously Sloan's eyes strayed towards the clock above the Superintendent's head. The hands stood at ten minutes to twelve o'clock.

‘My wife and I live at the far side of the county and naturally we started off this morning in good time.' Lionel Powell paused.

‘Er – naturally,' agreed Detective Inspector Sloan. Funerals called for punctuality if anything did: undertakers waited for no man.

‘On our way out of the gate I met our postman and so I took the letters – all this morning's post, that is – from him and put them in my pocket without opening them.' Lionel Powell gave a little cough. ‘Obviously, Inspector, I didn't want to delay leaving home – not in the – er – circumstances.'

‘Naturally,' said Sloan again.

‘However, as we had left in very good time we got over to East Calleshire early. Much too early.' Powell hesitated. ‘You see, we didn't really want to present ourselves at the Manor before the – er – proceedings … and our two daughters had arranged to go straight to the church. They were coming independently from London.'

‘We were, of course, going back to the Manor after the funeral,' contributed Mrs Julia Powell, sounding as if she hadn't relished the prospect. ‘They made it very clear that we were expected there then and that there was no need for us to do anything ourselves…'

Her husband said swiftly, ‘We were assured, Inspector, that it has always been the custom of the Regiment – the house, that is – for some form of reception to take place at the Manor after a funeral…'

‘I've heard that they do everything very well over there at Almstone,' murmured Sloan helpfully. It always behoved a policeman to know his own manor – and Manors.

‘Carry on, Mr Powell.' The Superintendent was getting restive. He started drumming his fingers on his desk and said, ‘Time's getting on.'

‘Since we had arrived outside Berebury in such very good time and did not want to go to the Manor first,' Lionel Powell obediently resumed his narrative, ‘we – er – decided instead to have a cup of coffee at a roadside café near Cullingoak called Pete's Place.'

‘It seemed the only establishment on that road for miles,' sniffed Julia Powell. She was dressed in grey with touches of black, the whole set off by a mauve scarf. The ensemble did nothing for her, decided Sloan. She still looked censorious rather than grieving.

‘It is,' said Sloan briefly. Was Lionel Powell going to tell him they'd seen drugs being passed or smelt cannabis being smoked at Pete's Place? Because, if so, it wouldn't be news to Detective Inspector Sloan or, very probably, to almost anyone in the county of Calleshire between the ages of twelve and twenty. And he, Sloan, was certainly not going to explain the carefully laid police plans for Pete and his Place to any passer-by, well intentioned or otherwise, civil servant or not.

‘It's not, of course, somewhere we would have chosen,' insisted Lionel Powell, ‘had there been anywhere else.'

‘There isn't,' said Sloan. In fact, had the Powells been actively seeking a culture shock they couldn't have found anywhere better.

‘Very insalubrious, we found it,' said Mrs Powell.

‘It is, indeed,' agreed Sloan hastily. This was not the pace at which the Superintendent liked statements to proceed. ‘So?'

‘So, we – I, that is, had time in which to open my morning's post…'

‘And?' prompted Sloan in a gallant attempt to extract the man's story more quickly.

‘And found that it included a letter to me from my late mother.'

‘Ah…' Sloan's gaze swivelled round in the direction of the Superintendent's desk. That explained the letter and its envelope there.

‘Posted after her death,' said Lionel Powell impressively.

‘In which,' contributed Superintendent Leeyes heavily, ‘Mrs Gertrude Powell quite clearly states her belief that someone was attempting to kill her.'

‘Someone unnamed?' asked Sloan.

‘Some person or persons unnamed,' responded Gertrude Powell's son pedantically. ‘She doesn't say who or how many in the letter.'

Suppressing a strong desire to say that the number was immaterial at this stage, it was the fact that mattered, Detective Inspector Sloan moved forward to examine the letter for himself.

‘This, I take it, sir, is your mother's handwriting?'

‘Undoubtedly,' said Lionel Powell.

The letter was written on Almstone Manor's writing paper in a large flowing hand and began, ‘My dear Lionel, By the time you receive this letter I shall be dead…'

‘There's no date on it,' pointed out Lionel, ‘but as you can see the envelope was postmarked in Berebury yesterday.'

Sloan read on. The message was nothing if not melodramatic. ‘… killed by an unknown hand under a Pragmatic Sanction I didn't want, but free at last to join your poor father.'

‘Melodramatic to the end,' said Julia Powell unkindly.

‘Do we know, sir, what she meant by Pragmatic Sanction?'

‘I don't, for one,' said Lionel Powell. ‘Historically it was a political arrangement to ensure the smooth succession of an undivided heritage but I don't think my mother would have known that.'

Sloan, matching the man's own pedantry, asked Lionel if he or his wife themselves had any reason to suppose that someone had accelerated Mrs Gertrude Powell's demise.

‘None whatsoever,' Lionel Powell came back quickly. ‘The whole idea is perfectly absurd.'

‘She's dead, isn't she?' said Julia Powell bleakly. ‘Isn't that enough for the police?'

‘Had she been dying, though?' countered Sloan. As he understood it, all the residents of the Manor were old and some of them were ill, too.

‘She had been unwell for some time,' said Gertie Powell's son, ‘and the doctor had told us more than once that she wouldn't live very long.'

‘Which doctor?' asked Sloan. There were doctors and doctors in Calleshire, as everywhere else in the world. And, heretical though the belief was thought in some circles to be, some of them were better – much better – at the practice of medicine than others.

Very much better.

‘Browne,' said Lionel Powell. ‘Dr Angus Browne. We were told he looked after everyone in the Manor and he seemed all right … that is, we had no reason to suppose he wasn't.'

Sloan nodded. He knew Dr Angus Browne – a middle-aged Scotsman from over Larking way – and knew, too, that the doctor was no fool.