Passing Strange (10 page)

As far as Joyce Cooper was concerned, Miss Tompkins clearly thought the role immortalized by the poet of a well-conducted person was like that of the Charlotte who went on cutting bread and butter in spite of having seen Werther's body ‘borne before her on a shutter'.

“How did you know Mr Esdaile was with you when Miss Cooper was attacked?” asked Sloan. There seemed no need at all for circumlocution with Miss Tompkins.

“The time, of course,” exclaimed Miss Tompkins.

“What about the time?” asked Sloan patiently.

“He came at just the wrong time.”

Sloan was not surprised. Maurice Esdaile was doomed to do the wrong thing.

“Don't you see, Inspector? With him there in my tent I couldn't do anything, could I?”

Sloan enquired what it was that she had wanted to do.

“Do?” The beads gave a dangerous lurch to starboard.

“Why, go and watch the Morris Dancers, of course.”

“And Mr Esdaile arrived when they were – er – performing, did he?” Sloan wasn't sure if ‘performing' was the right word. He didn't know a lot about Morris Dancing but he was quite sure about one thing: that Superintendent Leeyes knew less. The Superintendent didn't have a lot of time for Terpsichore.

“He came just before half past three,” she said in an aggrieved voice. “I'm sure he did it on purpose.”

“He knew about the Morris men, I take it?”

“Everyone knew,” declared Miss Tompkins sweepingly.

“Did they indeed?” murmured Sloan, making a note.

“I had to talk to him instead of going over to the lawn to see them. I even missed my tea because Mr Hebbinge thought I was over there. He said so afterwards.”

“I see,” said Sloan, in what he hoped were suitably sympathetic tones. He cleared his throat. “Might I enquire what it was Mr Esdaile came to the tent for?”

This simple question threw Miss Tompkins into a confusion compounded by a further dose of indignation.

“He came,” she said with sharply indrawn breath, “or said he came – I don't believe a word of it myself …”

“Yes?” said Sloan encouragingly. He had a lot of work to do.

“To ask if the Almstone Preservation Society was going to protest about the neglect of Manciple House.”

Years of training and experience had gone into Detective-Inspector Sloan's ability to keep his face straight and his voice impassive. He invoked all that he had learnt now. “I see, madam,” he said. “I shall, of course, be interviewing Mr Esdaile myself presently …” Curiosity, let alone duty, would see that he did, too. Criticizing the enemy for inefficiency – and in their own camp too – spoke of confidence of a very high order.

“It's an awful old place,” protested Miss Tompkins. “Positively tumbledown. I don't wonder that the Hebbinges built themselves a modern bungalow instead of living there.”

“An eyesore?” suggested Sloan.

“Just what I said myself to that man!” she said triumphantly, the bead necklace entering into the swing of things again.

“What did he say to that?”

“Told me it was a very fine old building with timber behind the brick.”

“Did he, indeed?” murmured Sloan.

“He had the effrontery to say that something should be done about it before it got any worse.”

Ay, thought Sloan to himself, there was the rub.

“Don't ask me how he knows about old houses.” She sniffed. “If he knows about them, that is …”

It sounded to Sloan as if Maurice Esdaile might very well know what he was talking about but he kept silent. Salt never did wounds any good.

“He wants to put up horrible little boxes of houses in the meadow,” complained Miss Tompkins. “I know because I've seen the plans. Mark my words, Inspector, they'll spoil the whole character of the village.”

Sloan nodded gravely. “You've lived in Almstone all your life, madam, I take it?”

She flushed. “Well, no, Inspector. Not exactly …”

Sloan was not unbearably surprised.

It was a phenomenon that Inspector Harpe had noted long ago. It fell to the unfortunate lot of Traffic Division to have to tangle with Local Government Surveyors and Planning Committees over new garage accesses, dangerous bends in roads and the development of housing estates, as well as with Westminster government over trunk roads and motorways, and with local Preservation Societies over practically everything.

Inspector Harpe had wearied of the bureaucratic approach years ago but as it was almost impossible for a planning application not to involve some aspect of Traffic Division – greenhouses and loft conversions excepted – he had instead learned to derive a certain amount of masochistic satisfaction from them. It was he who had told Sloan that protests seldom came from natives.

“It's the newcomers, Sloan, who can't stand change. Always. Don't ask me why. They come to a place, take a liking to it as it is – as they found it, that is – and they want it to stay like that for all time. The old inhabitants don't mind change anything like so much. If you ask me, half the time the real old stagers don't want their villages pickled …”

“I'm sure, madam,” said Sloan formally to Miss Tompkins, “that the appropriate authorities will take note of all your representations.” Policemen, he reminded himself, were civil servants of a very superior order. There was no reason why they shouldn't talk like them from time to time.

Speciously.

“We shall never surrender,” declared Miss Tompkins militantly.

“Quite so,” said Sloan. He stood up to go. “By the way …”

“Yes, Inspector?”

“Mr Esdaile – did he talk about anything except Manciple House?”

“No.”

It came out too quickly for it to be truth of the whole cloth. Sloan waited.

Miss Tompkins hesitated. She was, Sloan was sure, an essentially truthful woman. Time and truth went together. Sloan gave her time.

“No,” she repeated. “He didn't mention anything else, but …”

“Yes?” prompted Sloan with considerable restraint.

“But,” she said with evident difficulty, “he did something.”

“What was that?”

Miss Tompkins went quite pink. “He made a donation to our funds.”

Sloan did not know what to say.

“I couldn't very well stop him, could I, Inspector?” she said in anguished tones. “He gave it, you see.”

“No,” said Sloan. There were minds that thought every difficulty could be overcome with money. Perhaps Maurice Esdaile had one of them.

“Though I don't know what the Committee will say.”

If Sloan knew anything about Committees they would be divided.

“Bad money drives out good,” said Miss Tompkins sanctimoniously.

That was one way of putting it. Down at the police station they had less polite names for money that changed hands to further causes.

“Besides,” went on Miss Tompkins, “we had this notice up.”

“What notice?”

“It said, ‘All contributions gratefully received and suitably acknowledged.'”

Sloan clamped his jaws together.

“I wish now we hadn't had it there,” said Miss Tompkins plaintively.

Sloan took his leave without comment. Game, set and match seemed to have gone to Maurice Esdaile and moreover Miss Tompkins knew it. He shut the gate of Blenheim Cottage behind him with care. As he turned to secure the latch the word carved in the wooden sign board proclaiming the name of the house caught his eye.

“Let me see now,” he murmured to the closed door, “wasn't there a famous victory there too?”

Inspector Harpe's men brought Miss Richenda Mellows to Sloan. He had gone back to the patch of grass near the old stables and waited there. The long summer evening shadows cast dappled patches of contrasting shade here and there over the ground and the tents and the people were gone but in essence the scene was very much as it had been earlier in the day.

Detective-Inspector Sloan waited with Constable Crosby at his side as two burly Traffic men brought her across to him. She looked quite tiny between the two tall policemen.

“Miss Mellows?” he began. “Miss Richenda Mellows?”

“Yes?” she said huskily. “Is there something wrong? These men wouldn't tell me anything.”

“I'm Detective-Inspector Sloan of the Criminal Investigation Department at Berebury.”

“Another policeman?”

“Yes.” He cleared his throat. “I have some questions to put to you – important questions.”

Sloan found himself being considered by a pair of highly alert blue eyes. Their owner was on the tall side of short, with a crop of mid-brown hair. This looked to have a natural wave in it, which, if the casual nature of the rest of her appearance was anything to go by, was probably just as well. She was wearing blue jeans and a shaggy brown woollen jacket, and looked about sixteen. Eighteen was what she said she was.

“I can't keep warm in England,” she said, following his gaze. “I'd forgotten how cold the summers were.”

Sloan nodded. Apart from the heavy jacket, though, she was wearing what every other youngster in the country seemed to be wearing these days.

She flapped the jacket open with hands sunk deep into its pockets and again read his mind with uncanny accuracy. “When I got back to England there didn't seem to be any other kind of clothes to buy in the shops.”

Sloan could well believe it. He seldom saw any variety of teenager – good, bad or indifferent – dressed in anything else.

“It's a sort of uniform now, isn't it?” she said.

“Sort of,” agreed Sloan readily. The other thing about uniform was that it was a disguise too, though he did not say this. That was why policemen had numbers on their shoulders and motor vehicles had theirs fore and aft. It was the other sort of safety in numbers – though he did not say that either.

“Like school,” she said gravely.

There was something to be said for starting an interview on neutral ground. Sloan would be the first to agree with that.

“Make jeans compulsory,” he agreed, “and nobody would wear them.”

“We had tunics,” she said. “Can you believe it?”

Sloan looked up. “You went to school in England, miss, did you?” he said, though there was that in her voice that made him almost certain.

He was rewarded with an appraising stare.

“For a time,” said Miss Mellows noncommittally. “Daddy had to do something with me when my mother died. It didn't last.”

“I see.” There was a teasing lilt in her speech not entirely English too.

“I didn't like it,” she said. “They didn't like it.” She waved a hand. “And Daddy didn't like them so he took me back to South America with him.”

“Ah.”

“It isn't any help though, Inspector.”

“No?”

“Mr Terlingham has gone into all that.”

“Has he now?” Sloan would be having a word with Mr Stephen Terlingham of Messrs Terlingham, Terlingham and Owlet as soon as he could, although Saturday evening was not the most propitious time to invoke the help of that branch of the legal profession. Law enforcement went on all round the clock. Advice and advocacy on the other hand ‘kept no late lamps.'

“The school,” Miss Mellows informed him, “hadn't kept any of my exercise books.” She shrugged her shoulders. “It's not really surprising, is it?”

“Exercise books, miss?”

“A set of fingerprints would have been a help.” She peered at him. “You are a policeman, aren't you?”

“Yes, miss. I'm a policeman all right.” It was taking the oath of allegiance that made an ordinary citizen into a policeman. That, Sloan had decided years ago, was the dividing line. That and nothing else. The moment when a man or woman put forward their right hand and began, “I do solemnly and sincerely declare and affirm that I will well and truly serve our Sovereign Lady the Queen in the office of Constable, without favour or affection, malice or ill will …”

It was as bad as the Book of Common Prayer for saying everything twice over. On the other hand there was no ambiguity about it at all.

“… and that I will, to the best of my power cause the peace to be kept and preserved, and prevent all offences against the persons and properties of Her Majesty's subjects and that while I continue to hold the said office I will, to the best of my skill and knowledge, discharge all the duties thereof faithfully according to law.”

As undertakings went, it was pretty comprehensive.

“Fingerprints, did you say, miss?” It was a long time ago that a young and rather self-conscious Christopher Dennis Sloan had made his declaration of intent. “I'm afraid you have the advantage of me …”

“Mr Terlingham doesn't believe I'm me,” she said coolly.

“Why doesn't he?”

“Because of a letter,” she said.

“Yes?” said Sloan encouragingly.

“My father's uncle's wife …”

“That would be Mrs Agatha Mellows, I take it, miss?”

“It would.” She looked straight at Sloan. “Just after I was born she wrote to someone saying I was brown-eyed.” She turned her face slightly. A pair of bright blue eyes regarded him steadily. “That letter has turned up. Fingerprints,” she repeated, “might have proved I was me.”

Sloan considered the figure before him. “So …”

“Or handwriting,” she said. “They can do a lot with handwriting these days, can't they?”

“Sometimes,” said Sloan cautiously. Of all experts, handwriting ones went down least well in the witness-box. He didn't know why. Perhaps it was because there was still something of the fairground cheapjack about what they professed to know. People didn't like to think that what manner of person they were was apparent to a calligraphist in the way in which they formed their pothooks and hangers …

“So,” said Richenda Mellows, “I came down to Almstone today to see if there was anything else that might do instead.”