Stiff News (20 page)

She sniffed. ‘Never had. Never will.'

Detective Inspector Sloan gave the figure in the bed a long considered stare. ‘And are you going to tell me who he was or are you going to leave us to find out for ourselves?'

‘Inspector,' began Ned Carruthers, ‘I call this…'

Maisie gave Sloan a wickedly coquettish look. ‘You'll get to know anyway, won't you?'

‘It'll take longer, that's all,' said Sloan equably, ‘and time may be something we don't have now.'

She turned her head away as if she was staring into the past and seeing the action all over again like an old film.

‘Captain Markyate,' she said after a long pause. ‘Peter Bertram Markyate.'

It was Ned Carruthers who spoke next, ‘Everybody's uncle…'

Chapter Twenty

Smell sweet and blossom in their dust

‘More, young man?' In the kitchen Lisa Haines bridled at Detective Constable Crosby and his empty plate with a mixture of pleasure and high indignation. ‘After that great helping I gave you?'

‘It was very good.'

‘Who do you think you are? Oliver Twist?'

‘The Thin Man,' said Crosby.

The cook looked him up and down. ‘You could have fooled me.'

‘Ah,' rejoined Crosby swiftly, ‘but you can't fool me. That pie was the best I've had in years.'

‘Don't you think you can sweet-talk me, Constable, and get away with it.'

‘And the gravy was out of this world.'

‘Flattery won't get you anywhere, either.'

Crosby lifted his head. ‘Even the Inspector said so. He thinks your sauce is wonderful. Gravy raised to a higher power, he called it.'

‘What do you mean?' she demanded with surprising belligerence. ‘Even the Inspector!'

‘He's a very critical man,' said Crosby earnestly.

‘Hard to please, is he?' said the cook, opening the door of one of her ovens.

‘Discriminating, Mrs Haines, that's what he is,' said Crosby, peering over her shoulder and inhaling a deeply satisfying aroma.

‘More than can be said for some folks round here,' sniffed Mrs Haines.

‘No pleasing the residents?' suggested Crosby, one eye on the pie dish. There were still a few segments of feathery pastry crust to be seen, each exuding a rich brown substance.

‘If it isn't their teeth,' lamented the cook, ‘then it's liver or stomach troubles. ‘Terrible shame to get to their age and not to be able to enjoy your food, isn't it?'

The constable nodded. ‘Terrible.'

‘What's terrible now?' asked Hazel Finch, coming through the kitchen door with an empty tray in her hands. ‘Have they gone and found Mrs McBeath?'

‘Not being able to enjoy your food,' said Lisa Haines, who had her own culinary-based priorities. ‘That's what's terrible.'

‘It's not the only thing you can't enjoy when you're old,' said the care assistant vigorously. ‘There's other things as well. Take Mr Bryant now…'

‘He can't walk,' said Lisa Haines, giving the pie dish a considering look.

‘And Captain Markyate can't ever make up his mind,' said Hazel Finch.

‘Mrs Forbes,' said Crosby suddenly, ‘she can't die.'

‘She could,' said Lisa Haines, ‘but she won't. That's her trouble.'

‘And then there's Miss Bentley, who won't let go of being in charge…' said Hazel ruefully. ‘Can't stop telling me what to do.'

‘Comes of always being top, I suppose,' said Lisa Haines. She turned to Crosby. ‘Here, Constable, give me your plate. I think I might be able to manage a second helping for you after all.'

*   *   *

Detective Inspector Sloan walked down the long corridor to the library and pushed open the heavy old door. Dust motes danced in the early afternoon sunlight which was streaming through the windows and somewhere a fly buzzed, but otherwise all was still.

‘Matron told me I would find you here, Captain Markyate,' he said, pulling up a leather chair beside the old Fearnshire soldier. ‘Might I join you? We'd like a word.' This wasn't strictly true since Crosby was nowhere to be seen but the police plural would suffice.

Markyate lifted his head politely. ‘Please do. We're both here.'

Sloan spun round. ‘Both?'

Markyate pointed. Sunk deep into a large armchair across the room was Lionel Powell. The civil servant raised his hand in Sloan's direction by way of acknowledgement but did not speak.

Sloan could have kicked himself. Pure Kipling, it was, Lionel Powell being in the library. Just like Captain Wentworth in ‘Jane's Marriage' – ‘in a private limbo, where none had thought to look.' Lionel Powell wasn't ‘reading of a book', though. He was sitting attentively with Peter Markyate.

‘There is a time,' said Detective Inspector Sloan portentously, conscious that he might almost have been reading aloud something from the Book of Ecclesiastes, ‘for the truth to be told.' He cleared his throat and added a sentence that was quite his own, ‘And for it to be known exactly who knows what.'

It was Lionel Powell who spoke. ‘I now know, Inspector, why my mother wanted Captain Markyate to have that old Egyptian ornament.'

‘My wedding present to her,' said Markyate, looking more like an attentuated strand of willow than ever. By contrast, Lionel Powell looked a new man.

‘I picked it up in the souk,' said Markyate, ‘the day we got married. I hadn't got a bean in those days. Not a bean…'

‘That was the Tulloch treasure we were always hearing about,' said Lionel Powell calmly. ‘My mother was forever talking about that.'

‘It's what Gertie always called it,' said Markyate, ‘to throw people off the scent.'

‘You couldn't believe a word she said,' Lionel declared fervently, accepting Markyate's statement without demur. ‘Ever.'

‘The scent of what?' enquired Sloan, although he thought he could guess by now.

‘Our marriage,' Markyate said.

‘Why,' asked Detective Inspector Sloan, ‘should she want to do that?'

Captain Markyate lifted his head and said pallidly, ‘It was not what Gertie called a proper marriage.'

‘You went through a form of wedding ceremony,' said Sloan, consulting his notebook for what Maisie Carruthers had told him, ‘in Alexandria in Egypt on…'

‘Oh, the ceremony was all according to Cocker,' said Markyate readily. ‘Nothing wrong with that.'

‘So?' said Sloan, conscious that as Markyate spoke Lionel Powell was strangely relaxed.

‘Any man can stand up and say “I will”,' said the Captain, stirred almost to animation. ‘But…' his light, high voice trailed away.

‘But…' prompted Sloan gently. There were some things almost too difficult to put into words, and he suspected this was one of them.

‘But as for the rest…' He opened his hands in a gesture of despair.

Lionel Powell demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt that he was Gertie's son by asking with tactless clarity, ‘Captain Markyate, are you trying to tell us that the marriage was not consummated?'

‘Gertie was a great girl, always,' Markyate said obliquely, ‘but I'm afraid I wasn't ever – er – a great chap.'

‘And,' amplified Powell unnecessarily, ‘that means, of course, Inspector, that there were no children of the marriage.'

‘So…' invited Sloan.

‘So we were divorced,' said Peter Markyate simply. ‘And then Gertie married Hubert Powell.'

‘That's a relief, I must say,' said Lionel Powell, a touch of acid in his voice. ‘But why all the secrecy? That's what I don't understand.'

‘Hubert's family would never have let him marry a divorcee. Not in those days. It was all a long time ago, remember, and they were always a stuffy lot, the Powells. A very long time ago,' he added, staring into the distance as if he could see the past before his eyes, just as Maisie Carruthers had done.

‘Could they have stopped him?' came back Powell swiftly. ‘Presumably he was of age.'

‘Hubert's father held the purse strings,' said the Captain. He gave Lionel Powell a diffident smile. ‘It was a very large purse and Gertie liked the good life, remember.'

Lionel Powell jerked his shoulders in grudging agreement of this. ‘Naturally that is a factor for which my wife and I have always had cause to be grateful.'

Detective Inspector Sloan's mind was concentrating on something quite different.

‘The late Mrs Powell's letters, gentlemen,' he said, ‘which would seem to have been taken from her bedroom soon after her death…'

‘They were,' said Peter Markyate. ‘But not by me. They weren't there.'

‘You went into her room for them?'

‘I went there to try to retrieve my letters to her,' he said. ‘Better not seen, you know.'

‘That figures,' said Sloan.

‘But they'd already gone, Inspector.' He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I'd been beaten to it but by whom and why I can't tell you.'

‘And the amulet?'

‘I cleaned my fingerprints off that.' He gave them both a shy smile. ‘I always patted it when I went in to see Gertie. For old times' sake, you know. And it made her laugh.'

Sloan stood up. There must be rhyme and reason to all this if he could just put his finger on it. He turned to Lionel Powell. ‘And you, sir, were seen with Walter Bryant when his wheelchair took off down the drive.'

‘That's right, Inspector,' said Powell at once. ‘I gave him a push.'

‘Why?'

Powell looked pained. ‘Because he asked me to, of course. He thought he'd get there quicker with a good shove.'

‘Walter spotted the missing dirk while he was in here with his daughters,' explained Markyate, ‘and we both went looking for Hamish.'

Detective Inspector Sloan stared at him, light beginning to dawn at long last. ‘Tell me, what did the Brigadier do at Wadi el Gebra?'

The library was suddenly very quiet again except for the fly that was still buzzing at the window.

‘He ran away,' said Markyate simply.

‘But…' began Sloan, who thought wartime deserters were shot. At dawn. Not at eight o'clock. Eight o'clock had given time for a reprieve to reach a place of civil execution. There was no reprieve from a firing squad.

Markyate intruded on Sloan's private thoughts. ‘But Walter and I caught him and brought him back.'

‘To fight another day?'

‘He did very well in Italy,' said Markyate. ‘Made up for it there, all right, and later on in Normandy.'

‘So nobody knew?'

‘Not outside the Regiment,' said Markyate.

*   *   *

‘Sir…' Crosby came after Sloan down the corridor, a plate of chicken pie balanced precariously in one hand. ‘I think something funny's been going on here for a long, long time.'

‘So do I,' said Sloan grimly.

‘Something secret…'

‘Too many things are secret here. That's the whole trouble.' Sloan didn't slacken his pace. ‘Which one do you have in mind, Crosby?'

‘All those deaths here. And then there's Mrs Forbes. She's the old woman who won't die even though she could easily.'

‘Easily could,' Sloan corrected him, ‘is the name of that game. Put that plate down and follow me.'

The room that he made for was on the first floor and belonged to Brigadier Hamish MacIver. The old officer was lying on his bed rather than in it, Constable Wilkins on bedwatch beside him.

‘It is time we had a talk, Brigadier,' said Sloan.

‘Nothing to say,' growled MacIver.

‘About the work of the Escape Committee.'

‘Nothing to say,' he repeated.

‘I think,' said Sloan, ‘that here at the Manor your Escape Committee helped the incurably ill and old to die if they wanted to.'

The Brigadier said nothing.

‘And you instituted something called the Pragmatic Sanction whereby residents gave the Escape Committee their blessing for being helped out of this world as and when their infirmities got too much for them.'

‘Vets,' remarked the Brigadier offhandedly, ‘do it all the time.'

‘True. But it is not yet legal here and therefore naturally Judge Gillespie did not approve of it.'

‘He's always been an old stick-in-the-mud.'

‘The Judge kept a list of those residents whom he suspected of having been killed in this manner in his old coat…'

The Brigadier sat up suddenly. ‘He did what?'

‘Mrs Powell,' said Sloan, ‘was afraid that she might be killed in that way, too, and, as a noted lover of life, she, too, disapproved of the practice. She tried to draw attention to it after she was safely dead.'

‘From beyond the grave,' said Crosby. ‘Except that she didn't get there…'

MacIver wasn't listening. ‘What did you say was in the Judge's coat?'

‘A list of all those who had died here – except Mrs Powell.'

He sank back on his pillows, a little smile playing on his lips. ‘Really?'

‘You went looking for what you thought was in that coat on Friday evening.'

The Brigadier jerked his head up.

‘Which was,' said Sloan inexorably, ‘the same thing that you thought the late Mrs Powell might have kept among her letters, which you stole…' The Brigadier moistened his lips. ‘An account of your attempt at desertion in the face of enemy fire at the Tinchel.'

The Brigadier's lips might have been dry but his old eyes were becoming suspiciously rheumy.

‘But when Mrs McBeath saw that someone had slashed the Judge's coat,' said Sloan, ‘she naturally assumed that someone had found that list and might very well try to kill her, too, since she would be presumed to have come across it when mending the coat, as indeed she probably had.'

‘Very unlikely, I should have thought,' the Brigadier said, apparently unconcerned at this hypothesis.