Passing Strange (19 page)

There was none of that today.

The church congregation – who believed in safety in numbers – had departed and there was an apparent emptiness in Almstone. Sloan was not deceived. He knew that his progress up the High Street would have been as well-marked as if a spotlight had been trained upon him; that only the windows without curtains wouldn't have people behind them twitching them. That was because those inhabitants could monitor what he was doing without having to twitch a curtain.

Moreover he knew, too, that behind each front door would be found seething rumour and counter-rumour.

And fear.

People feared murder more than they feared bronchitis.

Perhaps that was why there were more policemen than there were doctors in the country.

Which was irrational because less than five hundred people died by murder each year. Fifty times as many were claimed by chronic bronchitis. And that without a single question being asked in Parliament of the Home Secretary into the bargain.

It didn't make sense.

Crosby, too, was aware of the emptiness of Almstone. He steered the police car steadily up the deserted village towards the Priory.

“It's like this in Westerns, too, sir, after someone's pulled a gun.” He hauled the steering-wheel over for a bend.

“Is it?”

“There's never a soul in sight by the time the Sheriff's posse rides in,” said Crosby confidently. “I expect you've noticed.”

“Not really,” said Sloan, aware of a need to be careful. The constable probably had a rich fantasy life …

“It all goes quiet and still,” he said.

“Then what happens?” He mustn't tread on anything treasured.

“Everything's sort of transfixed for a bit.”

Sloan glanced round. “Even in a one-horse town?”

“Then the men come out of the saloon to see what's going on.”

Sloan took a look at the King's Arms public house. He reckoned that there would be a fair amount of chat going on in there this lunch-time. The Press would be buying drinks all round. Even so, they'd stop serving smartly on closing time today for sure. It was Sloan's experience that when there had been a murder in their midst people observed laws that they hadn't bothered about in years – as if to appease some ancient God angry at the violation of one of his oldest prohibitions.

There wouldn't be any petty crime in Almstone for weeks.

That didn't make sense either.

“Then the men from the saloon go over to see who has been killed,” continued William Edward Crosby, film fan.

“That figures,” said Sloan.

“While the Sheriff asks which way the man who shot him went.”

That begged an awful lot of questions.

“What happens,” enquired Sloan with genuine interest, “when they haven't got a witness?”

No one had seen Joyce Cooper being killed. All that Sloan knew was that it had happened after half past three when Edward Hebbinge had taken her a cup of tea, and some time before four o'clock when Norman Burton had found her tent empty. And that she had drunk her tea – because her cup had been empty when it had been collected from her tent.

He corrected himself. The cup of tea had been drunk. He did not know for certain that it had been drunk by Joyce Cooper – only that it had not been emptied on the ground inside the tent because Crosby had checked that. He must be more careful about that sort of assumption, though it would have been no good asking the pathologist about the tea. That wouldn't have shown.

There was one assumption that he did feel free to make. Joyce Cooper had known who it was who had killed her because she had let that someone come close enough to slip some wire round her neck. Someone she didn't suspect of anything at all had been able to walk behind her and snare her as simply as they would have snared a rabbit.

Or someone too respectable to worry about.

Richenda Mellows had snared more than rabbits in her time in Brazil. He mustn't be beguiled by youth or innocence. No self-respecting policeman automatically bracketed them. If he did he was asking for trouble. Any girl literally brought up in the jungle must have known as much about killing with a snare as any poacher. He, Sloan, had already caused a man to be sent to the Greatorex Library to start checking the papers of Richard Mellows for such detail but he didn't need to wait to know the answer. He could guess. And any girl who had studied jungle lore without ever going to Brazil would at least be sound on theory.

Anyway garrotting wasn't difficult. It didn't take practice. It had been so common in the London underworld – and the early thief-takers so unpopular among its members – that Sir Robert Peel's policemen had worn collars on their tunics four inches high just to make it more difficult for the criminal classes to kill them that way. Suddenly, silently and from behind.

Those high collars – hated and uncomfortable – had stayed that height until 1840. Then London had got more peaceful or perhaps only fashion in crime had changed. Anyway, methods of killing policemen had shifted their pattern and the collar had come down a couple of inches. But it hadn't gone. Some of that stand-up collar had remained and had even been around when Sloan was a boy. Collar-and-tie policemen marked more than social change. They were the end of an era that had begun with patrolling the dark alleyways of the stews in 1829 – at risk.

“The man or his horse,” Crosby was saying on quite a different subject, “leaves a track behind him. That's how they know which way to go.”

“I should have thought of that,” said Sloan humbly. A certain simplicity of approach had a lot to be said for it.

Whoever had killed Joyce Cooper had left remarkably little in the way of tracks behind them. Perhaps a set of fingerprints on a reel of wire. Perhaps not. Or perhaps there were tracks to be found on the ground that Sloan did not recognize. Somewhere in the mixture of inheritance and planning someone stood to gain.

Or lose.

He mustn't forget that last.

There were always those who had a vested interest in the preservation of the
status quo
as well as those who stood to gain by change.

The politicians never forgot that either. Whole parties made it their platform.

But Maurice Esdaile insisted that everyone would benefit from the new development at Home Farm. His plans, he had told Sloan, satisfied every statutory requirement, pacified the Council for the Preservation of Rural Calleshire, conformed with all the Bye-Laws, fulfilled every planning regulation, and – God forbid that he should ever be so unlucky – weren't over some archaeological site.

“The Romans can still ruin a man, Inspector,” he had said. “Did you know that?”

And Esdaile Homes would leave a farming tenant glad to have less rent to pay and an owner with much-needed extra income in hand – to say nothing of an assortment of Harolds and Hildas with the retirement home of their dreams.

Miss Tompkins and her Almstone Preservation Society weren't happy but Sloan had an idea that they never would be. And if they hadn't existed they would probably have had to have been invented. Without their opposition the housing development would have sounded altogether too good to be true. Now there was a Puritan expression if ever there was one. Nevertheless, in spite of all that, he, Detective-Inspector Sloan, would just have a quick look at the County Council Planning Committee's Minutes.

It was sad but true that you couldn't always leave either the democratically elected or the nepotically appointed to take care of corruption in either legislators or administrators. Detective-Inspector Sloan saw himself a representative of the people every inch as much as a local Councillor did: when a whisper went round that this regulation or that had been unexpectedly waived Sloan always listened.

Maurice Esdaile might not be a man of substance either. That possibility Sloan hadn't overlooked. Someone else had been detailed to go round and knock up the keyholder at Companies House in the City of London. If Maurice Esdaile was a man of straw Sloan would know by tea-time.

Stephen Terlingham had led him to think that things would stay the same whether Richenda Mellows or Mrs Edith Wylly inherited. Mrs Wylly, he said, was too old to want to make great changes, and Richenda Mellows too young to be allowed to. Trustees were responsible for everything until the girl reached twenty-five. And if they weren't the traditional Three Wise Men, at least they were as disparate and apparently disinterested a group as any testator could devise.

If, thought Sloan cautiously, Stephen Terlingham had been mishandling the Priory funds he would want the
status quo
to last for a very long time. Mrs Wylly's lifetime at least. All the malefactors that Sloan had ever known had shared a delusion that a postponed Day of Judgement was a Day of Judgement that might somehow be persuaded to go away. And the long widowhood and illness of Mrs Agatha Mellows had demonstrated that – in Edward Hebbinge's experienced hands – the Priory estate could practically run itself.

From where Sloan viewed things it looked as if Stephen Terlingham of Messrs Terlingham, Terlingham and Owlet had sole custody of the Priory estate all the while he acted as sole executor but much less of a say as one of three trustees. He would still – he said – be its legal adviser if Mrs Wylly inherited. If the solicitor had sticky fingers he, Sloan concluded, would want Mrs Wylly to inherit.

Sloan would have to think about that. Certainly no one was better placed to cast doubt on the identity of the girl who said she was Richenda Hilary Pemberton Mellows. Just as no man was a hero to his valet, so no member of a profession was sea-green incorruptible to a policeman. Superintendent Leeyes always said that the only Latin a policeman needed to know was ‘
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes
', loosely translated behind his back as ‘Who takes care of the caretaker's daughter while the caretaker's daughter's taking care?'

But it didn't mean that at all. It meant something much more difficult to answer: who shall guard the guards themselves?

Stephen Terlingham had been at the Flower Show – Hebbinge had told him that and Terlingham himself had mentioned it. So, of course, had Maurice Esdaile. And Edward Hebbinge and Cedric Milsom and Herbert Kershaw – to say nothing of Nettle and Dock, and old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all …

And if Richenda Mellows had much to gain she also had much to lose – and she, too, had been there.

Sloan cleared his throat. “These tracks that you were talking about, Crosby, in these Westerns of yours. How do they know what they mean?”

“Easy, sir.” The constable steered the police car in through the Priory gates. “They always have a friendly Indian around who tells them.”

“Of course,” said Sloan gravely. “I was forgetting they spent all their time in Indian country.”

14

Vox humana

Norman Burton was always a conscientious man. He was also – in the way of the conscientious – both methodical and meticulous. This meant that he was ideally cast for his role in the world as village schoolmaster. ‘A man among boys: a boy among men' ran the unkind aphorism. Norman Burton preferred to think of himself as a man guided by two great precepts. ‘If a job was worth doing it was worth doing well' was one. No less important was its corollary about a hand once being set to the plough …

The irritating meticulousness that other men dismissed as petty and feminine was an important part of the make-up of the exemplar. When he thought about himself, which was not often, Norman Burton excused almost all the traits that went with schoolmastering as necessary ‘
pour encourager les autres
'.

Too detached and sensible to see himself as an Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders, he settled on filling the lesser role of the vertebra next to Atlas. That was the one known as Axis – the bone of the spine on which the head revolved. The Almstone and District Horticultural Society was one of the several village organizations which revolved round Norman Burton and he did the job of Secretary well because he saw it as one that was worth doing. Otherwise, of course, as he frequently remarked, he wouldn't have done it.

It was the part about once putting one's hand to the plough that caused him to work this Sunday afternoon. The murder of Joyce Cooper – someone whom he had known for years and someone too with a firm place in the established order of things in Almstone – was something that he was only going to be able to begin to assimilate slowly. So, like a domestic cat which was able to attack a sparrow while it ignored a pheasant, he turned his mind away from the greater evil of murder to tackle the lesser discrepancy concerning Ken Walls's tomatoes.

Mr Harvey McCurdle had been the judge of the Fruit and Vegetable Section. He had been invited out from Berebury to do the judging at Almstone, regardless of expense. A prophet might not be without honour save in his own country: the judge at a Horticultural Show was at considerable risk in his. That went for Baby Shows, too. Distance not only lent enchantment to judgements – after all, even St Paul had appealed to Rome, hadn't he? – but it also made for a certain amount of highly desirable unapproachability on the part of the judge.

It said much for Mr McCurdle's reputation in the horticultural world that it never for one moment occurred to Norman Burton that Harvey McCurdle's judgement might not have been reached impartially. That he might have made a genuine mistake Burton felt he had to allow for. After all ‘to err was human' and – dedicated dominie that he was – Burton knew all about mistakes. In Almstone Primary School they came in three sizes – mistakes, careless; mistakes, ignorant; and mistakes, contumacious.

Sunday luncheon over and his wife settled comfortably with the newspaper, he got out his own copy of the Flower Show Schedule. Mr Harvey McCurdle, experienced judge that he was, had not only marked his own schedule with the names of the winners but left a second copy for Norman Burton. He spread out his papers on the dining-room table. That copy should be with them.