Passing Strange (5 page)

“I only meant,” protested Walls, “that she wasn't one to go in for the Fancy Cakes Competition either.”

“Not the sort,” agreed Burton.

“Too busy, I should think,” opined the Priory agent briefly. “Almstone's a big village now and she never knew when she was going to be called out to a patient.”

“She had to leave the church in the middle of the Te Deum last Sunday morning,” remarked Norman Burton. “We all went quite flat without her. Sam Watkinson did his best but he's no singer.”

Sloan turned an enquiring eye towards him.

“She was playing the organ, Inspector, when they sent to say that Dora Smithson was having one of her turns again.”

Sloan drew breath. Superintendent Leeyes, sitting at his desk in Berebury Police Station, would be allowing only so much time and no more for the absorption of local colour. After that he'd be wanting hard facts. “I'll want to know the names of everyone who consulted her this afternoon,” he said.

“Take a bit of doing, that will,” said Pearson.

“That's going to be difficult,” said Burton simultaneously. “The place was crowded. Best Show ever …” His voice drained away and he said in a hollow voice “In terms of attendance, that is.”

“I'd been to her,” admitted Ken Walls unexpectedly into the little silence that fell upon them.

“Go on!” said Fred Pearson.

“Just for a bit of fun,” said the big man.

“What did she say?”

Walls looked embarassed. “She said my future was a bit cloudy.”

His audience regarded him with silent interest.

“Unless I lost weight,” said Walls.

Pearson hooted derisively. “That'll be the day.”

Sloan, who felt that Health Education was getting out of hand these days, took up the reins again. “I'd like you to try to remember who else you saw waiting to see her.” He turned to Edward Hebbinge. “And I'll need to see all over the Priory grounds, too, if you don't mind.”

Hebbinge moved forward. “Certainly, Inspector.”

“Did,” asked Sloan, “anything else – er – at all out of the ordinary happen this afternoon?”

Norman Burton told him about the car parked in the entrance to a field at Home Farm. “It had gone, though, by the time we got there, Inspector.”

“Right,” said Sloan briskly. “We'll check on that now.” He started to move away. “Where was it exactly?”

Fred Pearson cleared his throat and stayed where he was.

Sloan looked at him.

“There was something else, Inspector,” he said.

“Was there?” said Sloan.

Pearson shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Something very funny.”

“Yes?” said Sloan invitingly. There was a fundamental difference between information offered to the police and information extracted by them in questioning but it all had its place in the pattern of an investigation. Especially the investigation of murder.

“Ken won't mind my telling you,” said Pearson.

Sloan cocked an interested eye at Ken Walls. Walls nodded his consent.

Fred Pearson bent forward confidentially. “Are you a tomato man, Inspector?”

4

Contra gamba

Detective-Inspector Sloan got to the nearest telephone as soon as he could.

“The victim,” he reported back to his superior officer, “was called Joyce Mary Cooper.”

“Do we know her, Sloan?” asked Superintendent Leeyes from his desk at the police station at Berebury.

“No, sir, not as far as I know.” Sloan cleared his throat. While it was not true to say that down at the Police Station they knew all the women in the neighbourhood who were likely to be victims of murder, they certainly had a very good idea indeed about some.

“A good-looker?” enquired Superintendent Leeyes professionally.

Edward Hebbinge had used the expression
jolie laide
when he was talking to Sloan about Joyce Cooper but Sloan had no intention of quoting this to the Superintendent. Life was quite complicated enough as it was. “Plain but pleasant,” said Sloan firmly.

“Women who get themselves strangled …” began Leeyes.

Sloan interrupted him. “She was the local nurse and midwife.”

“Not a good-time girl, then?” said Leeyes.

“I don't think so, sir.” Could it be perhaps that pathologists and police officers tended to categorize women too easily?

“And no oil painting either?” continued Leeyes.

Sloan winced, consciously suppressing the memory of Joyce Cooper's face as he had last seen it. He wished the Superintendent had chosen a different simile. “No, sir.”

Leeyes grunted but did not speak.

It was impossible for Sloan to tell what was passing through the Superintendent's mind so he forged on. “She lived in Almstone High Street and seems to have been in her late forties.”

Leeyes pounced on the only weakness in the sentence. “Seems to have been?”

“Nobody,” said Sloan, “is quite sure how old she was.”

“Coy about it, was she?”

“I think,” said Sloan, “that it was rather a case of everyone just simply thinking of her as the District Nurse.”

“Like,” suggested Leeyes helpfully, “you have men, women and vicars.”

Sloan let this pass. He hadn't seen a copy of the Show Schedule but he doubted if there had been a class for passion fruit in it. “She'd been in the village a fair old time,” he said instead. “Twenty years at least.”

Leeyes grunted again. “That means she knew everyone in sight …”

“And everything about them,” supplemented Sloan.

“In and out of every house in the place,” agreed Leeyes.

“Everyone liked her,” volunteered Sloan. “Or so they say.”

“Kim,” pronounced Leeyes.

“Beg pardon, sir?”

“Kipling's ‘Little friend of all the world'.”

“She was rather on the short side, sir,” said Sloan, still puzzled. “That's how whoever did for her would have been able to drag her out of the back of the tent and stow her under the tarpaulin.”

“And that's what happened, is it, Sloan?”

“I think so,” he said cautiously. “We've reconstructed it as best we can. The grass shows definite signs of something having been dragged over it in the direction of the back of the tent.”

“And two and two make four.”

“Yes, sir.” Even in an uncertain world.

“Did she – er – go quietly, so to speak?”

“There was no sign of a struggle,” said Sloan. “Norman Burton – he's the Horticultural Show Secretary – says he went along to her tent when he started to have complaints that she wasn't there.”

“Now you see her, now you don't,” said Leeyes sourly. “Or was that when you had a conjuror?”

“Norman Burton said everything looked all right to him,” persisted Sloan. “A table, two chairs and crystal ball all set out. Not knocked over or anything.”

Leeyes grunted. “That number of things doesn't take a lot of putting to rights anyway if you've got time.”

“The murderer had time,” said Sloan.

“How come?”

“She had a great big sign with ‘Engaged' written on it and it was hanging on the outside of the tent to stop anyone else coming in while she had a client with her. That was still up then. Whoever,” said Sloan realistically, “was in there had all the time in the world.”

“That's going to be a lot of help, that is,” responded Leeyes smartly. “Murderer goes along, hangs up the ‘Keep Out' sign and – praise be – has all the peace and quiet he needs.”

“That's about it,” agreed Sloan uneasily. “It was only when there was a bit of a queue and nobody came out for a long time that someone went to find Norman Burton.”

“When?”

“He thinks it must have been about a quarter to four or a bit after.”

“And she was last seen alive when, Sloan?” asked Leeyes. “Do you know the time for sure?”

“Almost,” said Sloan. There was a subtle distinction in the Superintendent's last sentence that might have been lost on some officers. Sloan had noticed it, though. Superintendent Leeyes hadn't used the royal ‘We' yet. The case and all its shortcomings were still Sloan's.

“That's something, I suppose,” admitted Leeyes grudgingly.

“Edward Hebbinge – he's the Priory agent – took her a cup of tea about half past three,” said Sloan. “Trade was reckoned to be a bit slack about then.”

“Why?”

“That's when the Morris Men started dancing.”

Leeyes grunted. He didn't care for men who danced. “He did, did he?”

“They take all the stall-holders their tea on the job, so to speak,” amplified Sloan. “The stall-holders can't very well leave their posts or they might lose custom.”

“They'd lose a lot more than custom,” responded Leeyes vigorously, “if the kids out there are anything like the kids in here.”

“Yes, sir.” Sloan wasn't going to argue about that. “Well, on that basis they get their tea taken to them. Edward Hebbinge took a tray round to all the people on that side of the ground. Hers was the last.”

“The cup and saucer?”

“Empty when collected.”

“When would that have been?”

“About half an hour before they struck the tent. The washing-up was finished by half past five.”

“You've got that all very pat, Sloan.”

“They needed the cups,” said Sloan simply. “There's a whist drive tonight in the village hall.”

“Need the playing cards, too, did they?”

“What? Oh, I see. No. She wasn't using cards, sir. She had a crystal ball.”

“Find out anything else apart from these interesting sidelights on rural life?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well?”

“Some person or persons unknown parked a Mini in a field gateway at the farm just behind the Priory.”

“Promising, Sloan, promising.”

Sloan could almost hear the Superintendent rubbing his hands.

“It was gone by milking time,” he said.

“You've gone very rural out there all of a sudden, haven't you, Sloan?”

“A hired Mini, sir.”

“Very promising, Sloan, very promising.” More verbal rubbing of hands.

“Hired in London,” added Sloan. That was gilt on the gingerbread.

“That should go down well with the natives.”

Sloan sighed. “It has, sir. They've all quite made up their minds already about that Mini and its driver.”

The nearest telephone – the telephone that Sloan had been using – was not unnaturally the one at the Priory. It was not the telephone in the front hall but the instrument in Edward Hebbinge's office there. The land agent's office was a small but comfortable room which lay somewhere between the parlour end of the house and the kitchen quarters, and next door to what had obviously been the late Brigadier's gun-room. The telephone stood on an old-fashioned roll-top desk, a locking steel filing cabinet in a corner of the office being the only other visible concession to the twentieth century.

A stuffed trout in a case, with a plate suitably inscribed with a weight and a date, rested on a bracket over the chimney breast and a large-scale but very faded map of the Priory estate took up nearly all of the wall opposite the window. It was criss-crossed in three different varieties of hatching, while the course of the little river Alm, which was a tributary of the river Calle, was marked in what had started out in life as a more definite shade of the colour blue.

Sloan had cast an eye over the wall map while he had been on the telephone to the Superintendent. Now that he had replaced the receiver he moved over to get a better look at it. The line that indicated the river Alm ran through the land from north-east to south-west and acted as a dividing line between the two farms of Dorter End and Abbot's Hall. Home Farm, which was clearly bigger than either of the others, straddled the river and came up to the boundary of the house itself.

Trust the monks, thought Sloan to himself, to have picked a good spot for building their Priory. Those astute medieval men would have sought out a river with a nice patch of fertile farming land beside it just like this, with protective hill slopes behind for sheep. Sloan automatically noted it all and as promptly put it out of his mind.

As he opened the office door he could see that Edward Hebbinge was waiting for him at what could only be described as a courteous distance down the corridor. The land agent was far enough away to put any suggestion of eavesdropping out of court – but near enough to see Sloan emerge from the room.

“This way, Inspector.” He advanced towards him, waving him along a wide passageway lined with furniture that was shrouded in dust sheets. “Sorry about all this …”

“Spring cleaning?” responded Sloan absently.

“Not exactly.” The agent paused. “Old Mrs Mellows died in March – she was the widow of the owner but there seems to be some – er – doubt about the proper legatee.”

“Indeed?” said Sloan politely. In the ordinary way they didn't have a lot of trouble with long-lost heirs down at the police station. When they did, perjury seemed to be the popular charge.

“No doubt it will all be resolved in the end,” said Hebbinge, “but the solicitors say that nothing should be done for the time being.”

“They would,” said Sloan with some sympathy. The law seemed to live in a world all of its own.

“So in the meantime,” said Hebbinge, “we're trying to tread water. I must say –” he grimaced, – “that living in a state of suspended animation is easier said than done.”

“Someone missing?” asked Sloan. Missing persons figured quite often down at the police station.

“On the contrary.” The agent gave a quick twist of his lips. “There appears to be more than one – er – claimant.”