Dead Heading (17 page)

Inspector Harpe had been quite adamant on the matter. Two members of Traffic Division had spotted a car parked outside the grounds of the Berebury Garden Centre in the early hours of the morning with the driver sitting at the wheel. They had seen it again an hour or so later, still there.

‘You’re quite sure, aren’t you, Harry?’ asked Sloan, back at the police station again.

‘I’m not, but they are,’ responded Inspector Harpe promptly. He was known throughout the Calleshire Force as Happy Harry on account of his never having been seen to smile. He on his part maintained that there had never been anything in Traffic Division to make him smile. ‘They couldn’t think what an old codger like him was doing out and about at that hour of the night so they kept an eye …’

‘He’s a bit past “taking without owner’s consent”, a
man of that age,’ agreed Sloan, glad that stolen cars didn’t come within his own remit.

‘Twocking’s a young man’s crime,’ agreed Harpe, experienced in the matter. ‘Even so my boys fed the number of his car through our trusty number recognition system and decided he was the registered holder all right and properly insured.’

‘But you don’t know what he was doing out at the time?’

‘Sorry, Seedy.’ Harpe shrugged his shoulders. ‘You know how it is. The man’s driving was OK, he wasn’t speeding, he wasn’t even on a mobile phone which makes a change from some of the young ladies we come across. They had no reason to suppose he was drunk in charge so they couldn’t very well breathalyse him. His car seemed to be all right too, so my lads couldn’t think of anything to stop him for.’ The inspector sounded faintly regretful.

‘Where exactly was he when they saw him?’

‘Sitting outside the place. That’s all.’

‘Got any times?’

‘Is that important?’

‘It might be,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, adding fairly, ‘on the other hand it might not.’

Inspector Harpe has just given them to him when Sloan’s telephone rang. He listened for a moment and then said ‘Sorry, Harry, go to go. A post-mortem …’

Detective Constable Crosby did not like attending
post-mortem
examinations. This was made manifest by his seeking the furthest point in the mortuary at which he could stand and still be nominally part of the proceedings.

Detective Inspector Sloan did not exactly relish having to be present at post-mortems either but took good care not to allow this fact to be evident to Doctor Dabbe or the pathologist’s reserved assistant, Burns.

The doctor welcomed them to his domain as if the place was his home. Perhaps it was a good as his home, thought Sloan, some men being more married to their work than others. A vision of his own wife, Margaret, in their own home rose unbidden into his mind. He banished it as he realised that Doctor Dabbe was talking to him.

‘We’ve done his blood picture for you, Sloan,’ said Doctor Dabbe, adding somewhat unscientifically, ‘Alcohol levels pretty well ringing the bell at the top. He must have been as drunk as a monkey.’

‘What about drugs?’ As far as Sloan knew monkeys had more sense than to get drunk.

Doctor Dabbe shook his head. ‘No evidence of anything else found as yet. We’ll be doing more tests, of course.’

‘According to the pub landlord,’ said Sloan, ‘the deceased hadn’t been in the Railway Tavern last night but there was a great heap of empty cans out the back.’

‘They should have been recycled,’ observed Crosby censoriously.

The pathologist spoke some numbers into the microphone that dangled above the post-mortem table at mouth height, adding in an aside to the two policemen, ‘He’s more than a bit underweight which compounds the effect of alcohol.’

Sloan regarded the body on the post-mortem slab. ‘He was quite a small man in the first place.’

Doctor Dabbe pinched a fold of the dead man’s skin
between his gloved fingers and said with professional dispassion, ‘Undernourished too, but not dehyrated.’

‘Heavy drinkers don’t eat well,’ said Sloan.

‘They don’t usually eat at all,’ said the pathologist, peering round the puny body. ‘I’ll be surprised if we don’t find that he’s got an enlarged liver too.’

‘Quite so,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, who would have liked a little less of the ‘we’ in these particular surroundings.

There was a slight movement at the edge of the laboratory indicating that Detective Constable Crosby had put two and two together. ‘A small, unwell man who was as high as a kite wouldn’t have been able to put up much of a fight if someone came into his house late at night,’ he said.

‘A very drunk man of any size wouldn’t have been up to tying a rope over a beam and tying a noose round his neck of the right length, let alone clambering up on a chair and then kicking it out of the way,’ pointed out Sloan. ‘That’s right, isn’t it, doctor? We’re not talking suicide here, are we?’

‘Not like that poor lady over at Pelling,’ remarked Crosby brightly.

Doctor Dabbe looked up. ‘Oh, you mean the rector’s wife? Oh, no, no doubt about that one. Open and shut.’

That wasn’t a simile Sloan liked in the mortuary but anything that had happened in Pelling interested him just now and so he asked, ‘Had she been treated for depression or didn’t that come out?’

‘It did and she hadn’t,’ said Dabbe pithily. ‘At least she hadn’t consulted her general practitioner because he was called to the inquest.’ 

Sloan searched in the recesses of his mind for a name. ‘Doctor Heddon?’

‘No, not him. He’d died by then. A new fellow. I forget his name. Pity she didn’t go and see him rather than taking an overdose.’ Dabbe looked solemn. ‘Did you know that some early Christians used to feel that illness was sent by God and it was impious to attempt to cure it? Now they blame the doctors for not being able to cure everything.’

Detective Inspector Sloan, policeman to the last, took a deep breath and said, ‘I didn’t know that.’ The parallel that crime might equally have come from the Devil shouldn’t in his view stop a law officer from trying to prevent it or trying to bring the culprit to justice.

‘Perhaps she was one of those,’ said Doctor Dabbe. ‘Not,’ he added judiciously, ‘that you could do much about disease in those days so it probably didn’t matter anyway.’

‘How exactly did she do it?’ asked Sloan. One thing he did know was that suicides tended to follow a pattern. Copycat, like some crimes. And sometimes catching.

‘Overdose of paracetamol,’ said the pathologist succinctly.

Detective Constable Crosby chanted softly to himself, ‘Why are there no aspirins in the jungle? Because the “parrots eat ’em all”.’

Sloan elected not to hear this.

So did Doctor Dabbe, who said ‘Paracetamol makes for the liver like a homing pigeon.’

‘The Coroner brought in a verdict of suicide anyway,’ said Sloan.

‘Don’t talk to me about Coroners,’ said the pathologist. 

‘Delusions of grandeur, most of them,’ said Crosby.

‘What they say goes,’ said Sloan, who wasn’t sure if that was the same thing.

‘What they say gets reported in the press without the benefit of correction,’ said Doctor Dabbe ineluctably. He turned back and resumed addressing the microphone hanging above the deceased. ‘Macroscopic examination also shows burns on the face, lips and mouth consistent with the use of a control spray at close quarters. Further superficial signs include bruised fists and an appendix scar.’

Detective Inspector Sloan knew all about bruised fists in heavy drinkers, the pugnacious ones, that is.

Doctor Dabbe said, ‘My man, Burns, has got all the photographs of the knot that we need but I can’t tell you much more about it at this stage.’ The pathologist reached for something approximating to a saw while Crosby looked away.

Sloan asked, ‘If he didn’t tie it himself could someone standing behind him do it the same way without that showing?’

‘I’m afraid so. No help there but there’s no doubt about the facial burns. Or about the death being by suspension.’

Why this sounded better than hanging Sloan didn’t know.

‘The pathologist,’ began Sloan, reporting back, duty bound, from the mortuary to Superintendent Leeyes, ‘has advised me, sir, that he is minded to say that in his opinion the late Norman Potts did not take his own life.’

‘Then find out who did take it, Sloan,’ said Leeyes in his usual peremptory manner, adding for good measure ‘And why.’

‘The “how” might be a little easier to discover than the “who”,’ ventured Sloan more than a little tentatively. ‘Or even than the “why”.’

‘Means, motive and opportunity,’ the superintendent chanted the three essential constituents of crime perpetrated by the sane as if it was a mantra, which perhaps it was.

‘A rope, a beam and bit of know-how might do for the means,’ said Sloan, putting the old phrase ‘a rag, a bone and a hank of hair’ firmly to the back of his mind,
although now he came to think of it a hank of hair – well not so much a hank as just a hair or so – had turned up at the break-in of Enid Osgathorp’s cottage. He mustn’t forget that. Or the blood on the glass of the broken pantry window. He mustn’t forget Benedict Feakins’ interview either. He shot a surreptitious glance at his watch. ‘As for motive, sir, it’s a bit too soon to say. It would appear that the deceased was a less than ideal husband and stepson but whether he was the one who destroyed their orchids and therefore either his former wife or his stepfather …’

‘Or both,’ said Leeyes, a man capable of complicating any situation.

‘Or both,’ said Sloan compliantly, ‘took their revenge in a tit-for-tat way …’

‘This isn’t playground stuff surely, Sloan.’

‘No, sir, I’m aware that sounds highly unlikely.’

‘But you never can tell,’ agreed Leeyes. ‘There was that woman who could have been done in for a hatpin.’ The superintendent’s encounter with the dramatic works of George Bernard Shaw had foundered very early.

‘Quite so, sir,’ said Sloan, hastening on, ‘As for opportunity, no one seems to have seen or heard anything near his house down by the railway here.’

‘Two orchids scarcely amount to Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane,’ said Leeyes.

‘Beg pardon, sir?’

‘Macbeth,’ said the superintendent vaguely.

‘According to Doctor Dabbe,’ said Sloan, making for firmer ground, ‘the death took place either side of midnight last night.’

‘The bewitching hour,’ grunted Leeyes. ‘At least
Cinderella got the time right. You knew where you were with her, timewise.’

‘The doctor won’t say further than that at this stage,’ said Sloan stolidly. There was a school of thought that held that both nursery rhymes and fairy stories were rooted in crime, citing Little Red Riding Hood and the Babes in the Wood, but this was no time to be advancing the theory.

‘Doctor Dabbe never will say,’ grumbled Leeyes. ‘He’s too fly.’

‘And we don’t know at this stage either whether time was of the essence.’ There would be someone in the background whom he hoped was already establishing a timeline of events and alibis for him to work on later.

‘It doesn’t take us any nearer the “who” anyway,’ said Leeyes unhelpfully.

‘No, sir,’ agreed Sloan.

‘Well, don’t hang about, Sloan.’

‘No, sir,’ he said, making for the door.

The superintendent stopped him when his hand was on the door handle. ‘I did say that your Personal Development Discussion was on Friday morning, didn’t I?’

‘You did, sir,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, adding in an even voice. ‘I hadn’t forgotten.’

It was later when Sloan saw the superintendent again. ‘I don’t know which is worse,’ said Leeyes morosely.

‘Sir?’ Sloan was surprised. Admissions of doubt from his superior officer were few and far between.

‘Blackmail or murder.’

Detective Inspector Sloan didn’t know either. Blackmail, he thought, because there were sometimes – only rarely, of course – extenuating circumstances for murder, such as when the murderer was driven to commit it by the victim. That happened. Mercy killings came to mind too. He said, ‘We seem to have both, sir.’

Leeyes sniffed. ‘Blackmail is the worst, I think. Not that it’s in the Ten Commandments.’

‘A nasty mixture of power and greed,’ said Sloan, surprised. The superintendent usually only quoted the criminal law, not the moral one.

‘What we don’t seem to have, Sloan, is another body. That is if someone’s done for your lady blackmailer.’

‘What we do seem to have, sir, in Norman Potts,’ he advanced tentatively, ‘is a victim of unlawful killing. He may or may not have any connection with either the missing person or blackmail but would seem to be involved somehow with orchids.’ So, he thought, were Jack Haines and the two ladies at Capstan Purlieu but he didn’t know how or why.

Yet.

‘Would seem, Sloan?’ echoed Leeyes derisively. ‘Surely when two blooms of the same variety, said to have been supplied by one nursery and missing from another, are found sitting on the deceased’s sideboard after he’s been murdered it’s more than just chance?’

‘It’s subject to proof,’ murmured Sloan. He wasn’t at all sure how he was going to bring that about, one plant of a species being very much the same as another – as presumably nature intended.

‘And the aforementioned blooms known,’ added
Leeyes for good measure, ‘to have been the property of the missing woman.’

That too was subject to proof but Sloan thought it prudent not to say so.

‘And of a variety named after a bloodsucker,’ sniffed Leeyes. ‘You’d noticed that, I take it, Sloan?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Sloan went on to murmur vaguely that horticulture did seem to come into things somehow but he wasn’t sure quite how.

Superintendent Leeyes, no gardener, responded with something that would have greatly upset Capability Brown.

‘Quite so, sir,’ said Sloan hastily. ‘In the meantime the Scenes of Crime team are going over the deceased’s house and I am about to question Benedict Feakins under caution to see if I can get any further with him.’

Simon Puckle of Puckle, Puckle and Nunnery, who was sitting beside Benedict Feakins in the interview room at Berebury Police Station, was presenting a very different side of his work to the three other men there. Gone altogether was the professional family solicitor solemnly advising a client on probate matters. Gone too was the urbane man of the law and public citizen demonstrating helpfulness in response to a legitimate police inquiry. In its place was something more akin to a she-wolf protecting her young.

‘My client,’ he began formally, ‘has duly attended here for interview under caution in response to the written request delivered to him under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984.’

‘I didn’t need to come,’ said Benedict Feakins, sounding sulky. He pointed to his legal adviser. ‘But he said I ought to.’

‘Quite so,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, administering the caution without delay.

‘What I advised my client,’ murmured the solicitor, choosing his words with care, ‘was that he was not obliged to accept the police’s invitation to attend …’

‘Some invitation!’ echoed Feakins scornfully.

‘But,’ continued the solicitor smoothly, ‘I also advised him that if he did not attend as requested, his refusal to do so could be brought to the court’s attention at the time of any sentencing.’

‘Sentencing for what?’ howled Feakins, starting to leap up in his chair and then falling back in pain from his back.

‘For whatever you’d done,’ said Detective Constable Crosby in the manner of one spelling things out to the young.

‘I haven’t done anything,’ protested Feakins. ‘You’re just setting me up.’

‘On the contrary,’ said Sloan stiffly, ‘we are primarily interested in establishing further lines of enquiry in matters that have arisen in the village of Pelling.’ In the opinion of Detective Inspector Sloan what Benedict Feakins needed was a nursemaid, not a solicitor.

‘Why didn’t you call it a summons in the first place if that’s what it is?’ exploded Benedict Feakins.

‘Because it isn’t,’ repeated Detective Inspector Sloan austerely.

‘I must explain to you, Mr Feakins,’ said Simon Puckle, turning to his client, ‘that had you been served with a
summons you wouldn’t be being questioned any further.’

Unsure what this meant, Benedict Feakins sat back looking mutinous.

Detective Inspector Sloan took the lead. ‘It is an interview under the caution I have just read you. It is an occasion to give you the opportunity to comment on some matters that have been brought to our attention.’

‘Such as?’ challenged Feakins in spite of an admonitory look from Simon Puckle.

‘I do think, Inspector,’ intervened the solicitor, ‘that it would be a help if you could possibly be a little more specific.’

‘That’s right,’ said Feakins, sitting back and folding his arms across his chest.

‘Such as exactly what you had put on your bonfire,’ said Sloan.

‘I’ve told you already,’ said Feakins. ‘All my father’s old things.’

‘Including some cremated ashes,’ said Sloan. ‘You didn’t tell us about them.’

‘Why should I have done?’ Feakins came back quickly. ‘It’s not a crime what I did with them. They’ve got to go somewhere, haven’t they?’

Simon Puckle bent towards Benedict Feakins and said something under his breath to his client.

‘All right then,’ said that young man ungraciously, ‘but I don’t see why I should say anything.’

‘Because we have grounds for suspicion that an offence has been committed,’ Sloan proceeded patiently.

‘Over a bonfire?’ said Benedict Feakins, while Simon Puckle leant forward attentively.

‘Over a breaking and entering at Canonry Cottage, Pelling, at an unknown date,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan in a steely voice. He pulled a sheet of paper towards him and went on, ‘During which it is alleged that you scratched your head on some broken glass on a window, the property of Enid Maude Osgathorp, leaving traces of blood and hair on it.’

There were two quite different responses in the interview room to this. One was from Simon Puckle who said something sharp to his client but inaudible to the two policemen. The other was from Benedict Feakins himself. ‘I didn’t …’ he began and then fell quite silent.

And would say no more.

Not even when Detective Inspector Sloan advised him that his silence would be deemed to be a refusal to answer questions and recorded as such; and definitely not after Detective Constable Crosby had remarked in conversational tones that he had always understood that silence constituted consent.

‘Not in this instance,’ said Simon Puckle suavely. ‘I can if you wish quote the precedents.’

It was only after the detective constable had been rebuked for making the comment and told he was out of order by Detective Inspector Sloan that a faint smile crossed Feakins’ face. Simon Puckle merely shook his head sadly, but at what it was quite impossible to say.

The atmosphere at Capstan Purlieu Plants was still somewhat strained but it had been considerably relieved by the arrival there of Anthony Berra. Declaring himself in search of even more plants, he looked from one to the
other of the two women at the nursery before saying, ‘What’s up, Marilyn? Is there something wrong, Anna?’

‘No,’ said Anna Sutherland. She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Well, yes, I suppose, in a way.’

‘Yes, there is,’ said Marilyn Potts tearfully. ‘It’s Norman.’

‘Your Norman?’ asked Berra, giving a cough.

‘He’s not her Norman any more,’ insisted Anna. ‘Hasn’t been for ages.’

‘What about him?’ persisted Berra.

‘He’s dead,’ gulped Marilyn.

Anthony Berra sat down on a bench. ‘What’s happened? Tell me.’

‘We don’t know,’ said Anna. ‘The police have been round but they wouldn’t tell us anything much.’

‘Except that he was dead,’ wailed Marilyn, aping police-speak and adding in a solemn voice, ‘in circumstances that have still to be established.’

‘Whatever that might mean,’ said her friend.

Anthony Berra looked blankly from one to the other. ‘But he wasn’t an old man.’

‘And he isn’t going to be one now,’ said Anna Sutherland grimly. ‘And you won’t be either, Anthony, unless you get something done about that cough of yours.’

‘Come on, Marilyn,’ urged the landscape designer, ignoring this. ‘For heaven’s sake, fill me in.’

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anything more.’

‘Yes, you do,’ her friend Anna contradicted her. ‘Some person or persons unknown nicked some of Enid’s orchids from our shed after we got back from Staple St James last night.’

‘She won’t like that,’ said Anthony Berra immediately. ‘Enid’s always very particular about anything that’s hers.’

‘You can say that again,’ said Anna.

‘But why would anyone want to steal two of her orchids?’ he asked, clearly puzzled.

‘Search me,’ said Anna. ‘But the police were looking for whoever did it all right.’

‘And what – if anything – has that got to do with Norman dying?’ frowned Berra. ‘I don’t get it.’

‘The police didn’t say,’ said Anna in a detached manner. ‘In fact they didn’t say very much at all.’

‘We don’t even know where they are – the missing orchids, I mean,’ put in Marilyn. ‘They didn’t tell us that either.’

‘Or Norman, come to that,’ said Anna. ‘We don’t know where he is either.’

‘Except that he’s dead,’ said Marilyn, showing signs of bursting into tears.

Anthony Berra asked hurriedly, ‘What about Jack Haines? Does he know about Norman?’

Anna Sutherland shrugged her shoulders again. ‘I couldn’t say but I expect the police have been to see him too.’

‘They have,’ said Marilyn tremulously. ‘I rang him and he’s as puzzled as we are. Jack wondered if he’d committed suicide from remorse.’

‘Could be, I suppose,’ commented Berra, ‘if he was the one who opened Jack’s greenhouse doors.’

‘And ours,’ pointed out Anna vigorously.

‘All the same it seems going a bit far,’ said Berra. ‘Suicide, I mean.’

‘He always was a bit unbalanced,’ said Anna.

‘I hope Jack has told Russ Aqueel too,’ said Marilyn. ‘He and Norman were pretty thick when Norman lived and worked at the nursery.’

‘So they were,’ said Anthony Berra slowly. ‘I’d quite forgotten that connection.’