Losing Ground (14 page)

‘Small is beautiful.’ Sloan quoted someone famous. He wasn’t sure who. Yes, he was. Schumacher. The superintendent had the sentiment on the calendar in his office as part of his campaign against the amalgamation of police forces.

‘And there’s something else I’ve always found big business keen on.’

‘Besides money?’

Sloan’s irony went unremarked. ‘Consolidation,’ said the other man.

Sloan roughly translated that into, ‘If you can’t beat them, join them.’

‘So what’s your problem over in Berebury, then?’ asked his opposite number.

‘Arson,’ Sloan settled for the one thing that he was sure about. ‘Damage to a building due for redevelopment.’

The voice at the other end of the line gave this due consideration before asking, ‘Would that be good or bad for your firm?’

Detective Inspector Sloan sighed. ‘Part of the trouble is that for the life of me, I don’t know. Delay might weaken it – upset the finances and so on – if it holds up development.’

‘Calleford Construction would get their hands on it for less then. Delay would hold them up, too, of course…’

‘But then, they could afford it,’ concluded Sloan. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

‘On the other hand…’

‘Yes?’ One of the first things every police officer learnt when appearing in court was that there was invariably an ‘other hand’. It was something defence lawyers were always very keen on.

‘On the other hand,’ said his opposite number, ‘arson often facilitates redevelopment.’

‘We’d thought about that, too.’

‘Heads you win, tails you win,’ offered the man in Calleford philosophically. ‘I can tell you one thing for nothing,’ he went on, ‘and that’s that the head honcho at the firm over here is one of the smartest cookies around. No flies on him and he doesn’t take prisoners, either.’

‘I have news for you, Jason,’ grinned Stuart Bellamy, pushing open the pop star’s studio door. ‘The fuzz are after us.’

‘It’s all up, then is it?’ Jason Burke looked up, unalarmed. He was fiddling with a synthesiser in the corner. ‘By the way,
Stu, I don’t think that’s what they call the police any more. It’s dated.’

‘Right,’ conceded Bellamy, bowing to a higher realism. One of the things that performers like Kevin Cowlick had to be was up-to-date in current slang all the time.

Jason pushed a knob up a little, cocked his head to listen to the adjusted sound, and then said, ‘What is it we are meant to have been and gone and done, then? Tell me.’

Stuart Bellamy, accountant marque, grinned and said, ‘I think it’s to have enough money to make an offer for Tolmie Park, cash on the nail.’ He frowned. ‘At least, I think that’s the crime. They’re very hot on money-laundering these days.’

‘What about those spreadsheet thingies you do each year for the tax people?’

‘Balance sheet and income and expenditure account?’ Stuart was never sure how much of Jason’s professed ignorance was genuine.

‘Them. You’re the one who’s always saying they’re so important. Not me, mate.’

‘They are,’ insisted Bellamy, ‘but of course the Berebury Homes people haven’t seen them yet.’

Jason Burke moved over to the piano and started to strum his way through a scale. ‘Should be good enough for them when they do.’

Stuart Bellamy appreciated that this was the nearest Jason Burke – or Kevin Cowlick for that matter – would come to awarding him an accolade for good management.

Jason cocked his thumb at a shelf full of singles, ‘If not, those should be good enough for ‘em instead.’

‘They should. But don’t forget that they don’t know about
those yet, either,’ Bellamy reminded him, ‘but I expect they will pretty soon.’ He frowned. ‘I’ve been wondering why the police have got on to us so quickly in the first place. I think it might have been my fault for mentioning readily available funds to Lionel Perry so early on.’

‘For which read cash,’ said Jason.

‘I guess he told the police and they always get twitchy when there’s a lot of money around that they don’t know about and which hasn’t been in somebody’s family for yonks.’

Jason’s fingers hit the top of the scale with a thump. ‘According to the radio, there’s not a lot of damage from the fire at Tolmie Park. And all of it confined to the billiard room, which is stuck on the back anyway.’

‘That’s good,’ said Bellamy, trying to sound as if he meant it. Buying Tolmie Park wasn’t going to be easy whichever way you looked at it.

‘Strikes me as downright fishy,’ said Burke frankly. ‘You really didn’t do it, Stu, did you?’

Bellamy looked at him warily. He still never knew when Burke was joking and when he was being deadly serious. The pop star’s calculatedly expressionless face went down well with his fans; his deadpan look made life very difficult for everyone else.

‘Cos your job’s on the line if you did, Stu. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Course I didn’t, Jason. Arson couldn’t have helped you buy the place any way you look at it.’

‘It must have been meant to help somebody do something,’ said the pop star, wise in his generation.

‘Ah, I do think you’re right there, Jas. Otherwise the
police wouldn’t be noseying around like they are.’

‘So you can go straight ahead, then, and open negotiations, can’t you?’ said Burke. ‘What’s your next move going to be?’

Bellamy frowned. ‘I think we should let Douglas Anderson at the bank know that one of these days we’ll be wanting to spend big money all at once. It never does any harm to prepare the ground with your money people.’

‘And quite soon, Stu. Tell him that we’ll be wanting it quite soon and to have the dibs ready.’

‘Point taken,’ said Stuart Bellamy, retreating to the cubbyhole that constituted his office without telling Jason that ‘dibs’ wasn’t what they called money these days.

It was Ned Phillips who met Randolph Mansfield and Derek Hitchin when they returned to the offices of Berebury Homes from the damaged Tolmie Park. ‘Message from Mr Selby,’ he said to the new arrivals. ‘He’s had to go over to see the bank manager about something. He said to say he wants both your opinions about the damage as soon as possible…’

‘Funny, isn’t it, that he always wants things quickly when it takes such an age to get any figures out of him,’ said Hitchin.

‘He wants to know about the damage both from an insurance point of view and from a planning one,’ hurried on Ned Phillips.

‘And ne’er the twain shall meet,’ said Mansfield sourly. ‘Nobody understands that there are some things about old buildings that you can’t quantify. He thinks an architect is just a builder who’s been to a finishing school.’

‘The trouble,’ grumbled Hitchin, ‘is that our Robert also thinks that planning is something that you can quantify. Well,
you can’t. It’s more organic than that. If you ask me, it’s more like being in the lap of the gods.’

‘It’s certainly more luck than judgement,’ said Mansfield, ever the architect.

‘I thought there were guidelines,’ said Ned Phillips tentatively, looking alertly from one man to the other.

‘Guidelines not tram lines,’ said Hitchin. ‘With tram lines at least you know where they’re going…’

‘And where they end,’ put in Mansfield.

‘Guidelines,’ said Hitchin, ‘are what you might call, “always open to interpretation”.’

‘Bah,’ said Mansfield.

‘Er – I see,’ said Ned Phillips hastily. ‘Not helpful but still constraining.’

‘Especially when you want to be really innovative,’ said the architect. ‘Good design should be a living thing.’

‘Mind you,’ said Derek Hitchin, casting a sly glance at the architect, ‘radicalisation can be impractical.’

‘Only sometimes,’ came back Randolph Mansfield. Turning to Ned Phillips, he said, ‘None of this is your headache, anyway. It’s mine. Tell Mr Selby I’ll let him have his report just as soon as I can.’

‘Copy to the chairman,’ added Phillips. ‘I forgot to say that.’

Hitchin sniffed, ‘There always is. Lionel likes to be kept in the picture.’

Mansfield gave a hollow laugh. ‘Not that he always understands the principles of good design.’

‘Or the difficulties of carrying it out,’ said Hitchin, more graciously than was usual for him.

‘Right…’ said Ned Phillips uncertainly, going on, ‘but then I suppose chairmen are meant to be looking at the big picture.’

‘True.’ Mansfield stroked his chin. ‘So they say, anyway. Sometimes they’re just minding their backs.’

‘Can’t always see the wood for the trees, though, some of ‘em,’ said Hitchin.

‘The big picture and the future,’ said Mansfield, ‘that’s what they’re meant to be looking at.’

‘Ah,’ said Hitchin. ‘The future. Now, there’s a thing.’

Ned Phillips looked from one man to the other. ‘What’s up with the future?’

Derek Hitchin said, ‘Nothing for you to be worrying your pretty little copper-nob about, laddie.’

Ned Phillips flushed.

‘Be like us,’ said Randolph Mansfield, ‘and worry instead about why there was what is euphemistically called “a heavy police presence” at Tolmie Park since the fire. They want to interview us all about where we were this morning when the fire started.’

‘Police?’ stammered Phillips, his flush fading as quickly as it had come. ‘But I thought…’ His voice fell away before he had completed the sentence.

‘But you thought what?’ asked the architect curiously.

‘Nothing,’ said Phillips. He shook his head. ‘Nothing at all.’

‘That book you sent me to look up, sir,’ Detective Constable Crosby was standing by Sloan’s desk looking uncomfortable. ‘The baronetage.’

‘Yes?’ Sloan himself was studying a message from forensics about lobster shells and glass in shoes.

‘It just said “1 s” all the time except when it said “2 s”.’

‘An heir and to spare,’ said Sloan. There had been no doubt about the lobster shells or the glass.

‘Beg pardon, sir?’

‘Nothing. Go on.’ The lobster shells had been sitting on bones from adult beef cattle.

‘That “s” stands for son, sir, and he’s always called Francis Edward or Edward Francis which makes it difficult.’

‘Ringing the changes,’ said Sloan absently, turning over the report from forensics who wanted to know if he needed the cattle further identified.

‘At least the eldest sons are,’ said Crosby.

Sloan sighed. ‘Did you copy it out?’

Detective Constable Crosby struggled with a piece of paper stuck in his pocket. ‘That man who went to Switzerland, he died there in the war, leaving a baby son. He grew up and married…’

‘Those two stages in life, let me remind you, Crosby, don’t always go together these days.’

‘No, sir.’ Crosby was still a bachelor. ‘And that Filligree had two sons and a daughter and they had sons and daughters.’

Sloan said, ‘So there are still some of them around?’ For a fleeting moment he wondered whether they all had what Thomas Hardy had called ‘the family face’. It was his wife who liked Hardy – he hadn’t been struck on his writing – not a man’s writer, he decided. That was until she had made him listen to the poem:

I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon
.

He’d liked that and remembered it as he realised how absurdly pleased he had been at the christening of his own baby son when someone had remarked on the boy’s likeness to his grandfather.

‘Yes, sir.’ Crosby consulted the crumpled piece of paper. ‘And it’s the turn of the eldest to be Edward Francis.’

Detective Inspector Sloan laid the report from forensics down on his desk. He would decide later whether to ask the clever scientists there if the bones had come from a cow called Daisy or a bull called Taurus. ‘Since routine is what makes detection what it is,’ he said, ‘I suppose we’d better track the latest Filligree down. You can be getting on with that, Crosby. That’s after we’ve taken some statements from the staff at Berebury Homes about their route to work this morning.’

These proved singularly unhelpful. Randolph Mansfield lived at the other side of the county and never came past Tolmie Park. Robert Selby always came to work that way.

‘No, Inspector,’ he said when interviewed. ‘There was certainly no smoke visible when I came by. I do, of course, get in quite early these days. My department is very busy just now and I have to put in a long day just to keep up with the workload.’ He shook his head. ‘No, I didn’t see Lionel at all but then I wouldn’t expect to have done. He doesn’t usually get in until much later.’

Derek Hitchin said breezily, ‘Yes, I came that way. Don’t always but I did this morning. No, I didn’t see Lionel’s car at all but then he would have been later than those of us who have to earn our crust.’

‘Quite so,’ said Sloan. ‘And any sign of fire? Did you see smoke?’

‘Nope. I wouldn’t have gone any further if I had, would I?’

‘I’ suppose not,’ said Sloan, who supposed no such thing. ‘By the way, the gate to the drive over there was locked when the fire brigade arrived. Do you know who has keys?’

‘Anyone who needs to go over there collects them from the office,’ said Hitchin. ‘They’re on a hook there.’

‘Labelled?’

‘Course they’re labelled, Inspector. Tolmie Park isn’t the only development we’re working on, you know. Fine mess we’d all be in if we didn’t know which key was which.’

Auriole Allen lived between Berebury and Calleford and thus did not pass Tolmie Park. ‘And I was a little bit later than usual
this morning, Inspector,’ she admitted. ‘I stopped off on the way to collect the local paper. It’s the one I have to keep my eye on most.’

Ned Phillips was willing but uninformative – up to a point, that is. ‘Yes, I came in that way from Almstone first thing but I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Mind you, Inspector, you need to keep your eyes on the road that way. Before you know where you are there’ll be a tractor in front of you and no room to pass. Anyway the house is too far from the road to see it properly.’

Sloan asked whether he had seen Lionel Perry’s car on the road.

‘The Jag? No, but I took it round to the garage for them to mend the spare after he’d had a flat. The garage couldn’t find a puncture. They said it was a loose valve.’