Passing Strange (7 page)

“Who would want to kill anyone?” shuddered Mrs Kershaw. She was a stiff woman of immaculate grooming. Her flower arrangements reflected this. They tended to be formal set pieces, faultlessly executed.

“And why?” demanded Kershaw. “Tell me that!”

But this Mrs Kershaw couldn't do either.

Her husband began to pace up and down the large farm kitchen while his wife busied herself between larder and sink.

“It's only a cold supper tonight, Herbert, because of the Show.”

He acknowledged this with a gesture of indifference, his mind clearly elsewhere. “Cedric Milsom …”

“With Eileen at the Cullingoak Pony Show,” said Millicent Kershaw swiftly.

Too swiftly.

“All the time?” queried Kershaw.

“Most of the time,” qualified Millicent Kershaw. “Eileen says he was there most of the time.”

“He doesn't usually go to Shows,” observed her husband. Cedric Milsom's proclivities lay not with the horses but with the ladies.

“I don't think he strays too far in the afternoon,” said Millicent Kershaw. She was an unimaginative, literal-minded woman. As far as she was concerned the only reason that the Adam and Eve and Serpent scenario in the Garden of Eden had been played in daylight was the purely practical one of the difficulty of portraying temptation on canvas in darkness.

But Herbert Kershaw was thinking about something else. “There was someone strange at the Show, Milly.”

“A stranger, you mean?” she said, putting out a salad. “There must have been plenty of those. It was very crowded.”

“Both a stranger and someone strange,” he said enigmatically.

“Who?”

“Maurice Esdaile. I saw him there myself.”

“Will you have cider tonight, dear?” She cast her eye over the meal. “Who's Maurice Esdaile?”

“Maurice Esdaile,” said her husband, “is the leading light of the firm of Mitchell Esdaile, Ltd; property developers.”

“Oh, them … I'm sorry, it's only cold chicken.” She tweaked a piece of lettuce into better shape from sheer force of habit – flower-arranger's habit. “Why shouldn't he come? If they're going to build all those houses down by the Priory he's entitled to come to village things, isn't he?”

“I suppose so.” Herbert Kershaw frowned heavily. “But what on earth did Joyce Cooper want to go and get herself killed for?”

There had been another car standing beside the police car, one which Detective-Inspector Sloan recognized without difficulty.

Dr Dabbe had arrived. By the time Sloan got back to where the Fortune Teller's tent had been the Consultant Pathologist to the Berebury District General Hospital was staring down at the body.

“Nasty,” he said to Sloan. “Very nasty.”

“Yes, Doctor.” Sloan hadn't put his notebook away. Not with the name of Mellows in it.

The doctor's assistant, Burns, was recording the temperature of the atmosphere.

“You can cry ‘Murder' all right, Sloan,” said the pathologist immediately.

Sloan nodded. Dr Dabbe never forgot that the Police Surgeon was first and foremost an arm of the law.

“All right if I go nearer?” asked Dabbe.

It was Detective-Constable Crosby who said “Yes” to that. “I've been over the ground, Doctor.”

Just as the most important principle of medical care was “First do no harm,” Dr Dabbe never forgot either that the most important principle of forensic medicine was “Thou shalt not destroy evidence.”

The doctor moved forward now and crouched down beside the body of the District Nurse.

“She won't have known very much about it,” he said after one swift glance at her neck and hands.

Sloan made a note in his book. Arm of the law rather than patient's friend the police surgeon might be but a man was a man for all that.

“In fact, Sloan, ‘No pain felt she …'”

“I'm glad to hear it,” said Sloan. If there could ever be such a thing as a credit side to murder that entry could go on it.

“‘I am quite sure she felt no pain'.”

“Good,” said Sloan, faintly puzzled. No one had ever called the pathologist a man of feeling.

“
Porphyria's Lover
,” said Dabbe.

“I don't think, Doctor, that there is any question of …”

“Robert Browning, Sloan,” said Dabbe. “Poet.”

“Ah …”

The pathologist continued to give the body his attention. “Someone stood behind her, Sloan, and pulled something tight.”

Sloan made another note.

Dr Dabbe stroked his chin. “Sorry to sound like a government spokesman but I can't say very much more than that at this stage.”

“Could anyone say that she wasn't expecting an attack?”

“I can say she didn't put up a fight,” said Dabbe. “Is that any good to you?”

“Could be,” said Sloan moderately.

“It looks,” pronounced Dabbe after giving the victim an even closer visual examination, “as if she let someone walk right up beside or even behind her. I'll tell you which presently.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

“And whether they were right-handed.”

“Anything would be useful,” said Sloan warmly. “Anything.”

“But I can't tell you whether they had jug-handled ears or sugarloaf heads.”

“No, Doctor.” Cesare Lombroso might have studied the physiognomy of men who had erred and strayed but Sloan, like most policemen, could be described as belonging to an earlier school of thought. What might be called the
Macbeth
one. Where there was ‘no art to find the mind's construction in the face.'

“And you'll have to look for the murderer's fingerprints yourself.”

“Yes, Doctor.” Nowadays those who would find the answer to everything looked at chromosomes, not faces. He coughed. “What about sex, Doctor?”

The pathologist opened his mouth to speak, looked at Sloan's expression and changed his mind. Instead he peered even closer at the late Joyce Cooper's neck, motioning Burns to hold a piece of her costume to one side.

Presently he said, “You don't need a lot of strength to kill someone this way. That's what you mean, isn't it?”

“Or skill?” enquired Sloan. There had been a spate of murders after the war which Defence Counsel had seemed quite happy to lay at the door of Commando Training Schools.

Dabbe shook his head. “It's very simple, you know, to loop something over a woman's head and tighten it.”

“What about practice?” Sloan felt he was fighting a losing battle. Murder, he reminded himself yet again, was usually committed once in a lifetime. For both parties, so to say.

“It helps, of course,” said the pathologist, “but you could probably manage something like this at your first attempt easily enough.” He pointed a bony finger. “The neck is the body's most vulnerable place.”

“She would have been sitting, too I expect,” said Sloan as the pathologist bent even closer to the victim. The irony of it was that Joyce Cooper could well have seen her own fate in her own crystal ball clearly enough. Her immediate future would have been reflected briefly in the polished glass as someone approached her …

“I can't tell you much about the weapon at this stage, Sloan,” said Dabbe over his shoulder.

Sloan pulled his thoughts together. Sooner or later he, C. D. Sloan, working detective, was going to have to put a name to the face that had appeared in that crystal ball at the time of the murder.

“But,” added the pathologist handsomely, “I'll present it to you on a charger by morning.”

“Thank you,” said Sloan temperately.

“Even if deodand has gone out.”

“Beg pardon, Doctor?”

“The instrument of death,” Dabbe informed him, “always used to become the property of the Crown.”

“‘In good King Charles's golden days'?” enquired Sloan ironically. He mightn't know his Browning but he reckoned that everyone who had to do with government – let alone with local politics – ought to know
The Vicar of Bray
by heart.

“Whatever had caused the death,” said the pathologist getting back to his feet, “was automatically forfeit to the Crown.”

It would be an old custom, decided Sloan to himself. There was always an undercurrent of a more glorious past in the speech of those who were fond of talking about times gone by. Unless they were sociologists.

“And the practice,” said Dr Dabbe, dusting his trouser knees, “was called deodand.”

“Really, Doctor?” said Sloan. There was a variety of offensive weapons in the Station Sergeant's drawer at Berebury confiscated without the backing of any law at all under a system called Common Sense. Catapults were having a bit of a vogue at the moment; flick knives weren't so popular.

“Queen Victoria put a stop to it.”

Sloan wasn't surprised. As a young constable he'd had to learn a lot of laws. Queen Victoria's name was attached to quite a number of them.

“After she'd been frightened by a railway engine,” said Dabbe.

“What was that, Doctor?” It hadn't occurred to Sloan that in Sixty Glorious Years Queen Victoria had been frightened of anything.

“As the system stood, Sloan, if there had been a railway accident and someone had been killed in that accident, by rights …”

“According to law and custom,” put in Sloan. The word ‘Rights' was an evocative one. They weren't allowed to use it at the Police Station.

“According to law and custom,” agreed Dabbe amiably, “the Crown would have had to have the instrument of death as deodand.”

“The railway engine?”

“Nothing less. She changed the law pretty quickly, I can tell you,” said the pathologist, “once the railways really got going. Didn't want Stephenson's Rocket cluttering up Windsor Castle.”

“No.” For a brief joyous moment Sloan wondered if Her late Majesty just might have been wrong. If every motor vehicle that killed someone automatically belonged to the Crown after the accident Inspector Harpe might not be such a soured man.

“Don't worry, Sloan,” added Dr Dabbe, deadly serious now. “A length of thin wire isn't going to take up a lot of room.”

6

Cor anglais choir

“Just a few questions, sir,” began Sloan with disarming diffidence, “if you have a moment.”

The gentle art of questioning did not have its Izaak Walton putting pen to paper and advising from a wealth of experience on how it should be done. There were in fact very few guide books for the enquiring policeman which laid down the best way to interrogate either potential witness or actual suspect. The successful examination of the one and the cross-examination of the other were both skills that the budding police officer had to learn for himself the hard way. By trial and error. Trial and success didn't seem to make the same mark. Trial and error were what a man learned from.

“I won't keep you a minute,” said Sloan persuasively.

Edward Hebbinge nodded.

“Perhaps, sir, if we could just get out of the way while they move the body …”

“A very good idea,” said Hebbinge quickly.

The two men walked away from where the Fortune Teller's tent had been.

It was no accident that Sloan kept the land agent by his side for their chat. The last thing he wanted at this stage was an eyeball to eyeball interview with anyone. What he wanted was information. Fast.

“I think,” said Sloan truthfully, “it would help if I got the Priory ownership sorted out for my report.”

The land agent gave a short humourless laugh. “I must say you'll be a better man than Terlingham, Terlingham and Owlet, Inspector, if you can do that. As I told you before, they're having trouble enough sorting it out themselves.”

“Trouble?” said Sloan innocently.

Superintendent Leeyes insisted that successful questioning was a subject that couldn't be taught. In the Superintendent's book a man could either do it or he couldn't. The Assistant Chief Constable, who was a man of a wider world, often said it was a good thing if what the officer had really wanted to do was to go on the stage.

This was not a lot of help.

The Church and the Law were the professions actors manqué entered.

“Trouble?” he said again. “Not Terlingham, Terlingham and Owlet, surely, sir …”

The long-established legal firm of Terlingham, Terlingham and Owlet of Bishop's Yard, Calleford, were of the utmost respectability and seldom dealt with what the police called trouble. They ‘looked after' families and their affairs, giving litigation and criminal law a wide berth. Conveyancing and probate were what they liked doing. Divorce and motoring cases were what they had to deal with as well because ‘their' families married and drove. As a rule the nearest they got to Criminal Law was the reaping and binding of the wild oats sown by the sons of the landed gentry. An irresponsible eldest son was their greatest anxiety. Irresponsible younger sons could be encouraged to make their own way in the world out of Calleshire.

“Let's say they've got a problem, then,” conceded Hebbinge.

“Tell me,” invited the detective-inspector. It was the memory of an earlier trial and error that made Sloan keep his notebook well out of sight in his pocket now. Be they ever so ignorant, most men chose words that were going to be written down with greater care than those that were not. And the man he wanted to talk to wasn't ignorant at all.

On the contrary.

“The Brigadier and his wife had no children,” said Edward Hebbinge. “I think,” he added fairly, “you could say that that was the real trouble.”

“This happens,” said Sloan. “It doesn't usually make for trouble on its own.”

“The estate is settled on the next direct heir.”

“Even then.”

“Perhaps not.”

“Though,” observed Sloan profoundly, “where there's a will there's usually a relative.”