Stiff News (19 page)

Only the actions of the just

‘So,' said Detective Inspector Sloan, ‘someone…'

‘The Judge,' said Crosby, his mouth full.

They were both ensconced in Matron's sitting room, each with a plate of chicken pie on his knee. Two men from the first panda car to reach the Manor – Constables Wilkins and Steele – were mounting guard over Walter Bryant and Hamish MacIver in their respective rooms, while the next pair of police to arrive were manning the front and back entrances to the Manor. Hazel Finch was presently giving an immobilized Walter Bryant and a bruised Brigadier their luncheons in the seclusion of their rooms.

‘Probably the Judge, but still subject to proof,' said Sloan. The fact that the pace of the investigation had increased was more reason, not less, for being careful about jumping to hasty conclusions.

‘All right, then, someone…' conceded Crosby, waving a fork in the air.

‘Someone had carefully kept hidden a list of all the residents in the Manor who died there…'

‘Except Mrs Powell,' pointed out Crosby. ‘She wasn't on that list, was she, even though she snuffed it here?'

‘Except Mrs Powell,' agreed Sloan, ‘but not, remember, including those residents who happened to die away from the Manor.' This was the nub of the matter. He was sure of that now.

‘Nothing criminal in keeping a list,' said Crosby obdurately.

‘Nothing,' agreed Sloan.

‘Nothing criminal, come to that, in someone else wanting to get their hands on a list,' the constable said. ‘It's a free country.'

‘A list that Mrs McBeath was afraid someone else would guess that she might have seen?' enquired Sloan ironically. ‘So afraid that she's taken off…'

‘Took her time to do it, though, didn't she?' Crosby chased a last piece of pastry round his plate with his fork. ‘That's if she saw it when she did that repair job on the coat for the old geezer's birthday.'

‘True,' agreed Sloan. ‘So what's happened since then which might have changed things?'

‘Gertrude Powell died, that's all,' said Crosby indistinctly. He finished the mouthful of chicken pie and went on, ‘Oh, and that new woman arrived.'

‘Mrs Maisie Carruthers,' said Sloan softly. ‘I'd almost forgotten her.'

‘She's been in her room all morning,' said Crosby. ‘I checked like you said, sir. Her and her son.'

‘Then sometime last night or very early this morning Mrs McBeath must have spotted the slashed coat in the cloakroom and put two and two together,' said Sloan. ‘Which,' he added realistically, ‘at the moment is rather more than we seem able to do, Crosby.'

‘But,' said the constable profoundly, ‘which two and two and which four?'

‘That,' agreed Sloan, ‘is the question.'

‘We don't know who slashed the coat either,' said Crosby.

‘Let alone why.'

‘Our trouble, sir,' declared the constable with a sigh, ‘is that we're seeing them as they all are now. ‘They were probably younger when they got up to no good.'

‘True,' conceded Sloan, veteran giver of evidence in juvenile courts. He didn't need telling that crime was age-related, that it was an activity that young males often grew out of. Though, unless he was much mistaken, malfeasance at the Manor would seem to disprove this.

Crosby laid his knife and fork carefully across his empty plate. ‘Now that was really good.'

‘And where do you go when you're an old lady with nowhere to go?' mused Detective Inspector Sloan, conscious that Mrs McBeath's safety ought to be his very highest priority now. To the naked eye, the blade of the dirk had seemed dry and clean but no true investigating officer could very well call that particular observation conclusive evidence that any weapon had never been used on a person in anger.

Not without Forensics saying so.

In writing.

‘Social services?' suggested Crosby, worldly-wise in his generation.

‘Church?' said Sloan, showing his age. Mrs McBeath was, after all, also of an age still to consider the church a source of succour. ‘Or the hospital?' Even now, all such ports of call in Calleshire and every foot and motor patrol were being alerted. A cohort of reinforcements were already on their way from Berebury Police Station to join those on the spot in a search of the grounds of the Manor.

‘Or is she with all the other runaways under the railway arches at Berebury?' asked Crosby with feeling. He didn't like what the drop-outs there shouted after him as he went past them. ‘What I want to know, sir, is why that old judge made out that list of names in the first place.'

‘He said it was so that he didn't forget old friends,' recounted Detective Inspector Sloan. ‘How's that for a tale?'

‘You don't need to write down six names to remember them,' said Crosby scornfully. ‘Even if you are that ancient.'

‘No,' agreed Sloan, ‘you don't. So?'

‘So?'

‘So why did he do it?'

Crosby said, ‘I can't think.'

Heroically resisting the temptation to comment on this naive admission, Sloan said mildly, ‘It could just be, Crosby, that he had planned on that list of names being found after he'd died.'

Crosby considered this. ‘Just like Mrs Powell wanted us to know what had been going on after she wasn't here?'

‘So it would seem.'

‘And someone else doesn't want us to,' said Crosby neatly.

‘Keep going.'

‘At least the Judge'd be safe then, wouldn't he, sir? If he was dead, I mean.'

‘But safe from what?' asked Sloan, letting the theology of this slide by. ‘I can't see that there could be anything left for him to be frightened of now.' At ninety, Sloan thought, surely one must be done with this world and things of this world – or was that wishful thinking?

‘Conscience?' suggested Crosby slyly. ‘That's, sir, if judges have consciences…'

‘I doubt if it's that.' Sloan's latest encounter with Judge Calum Gillespie had been unfruitful to the point of pure exasperation. ‘He's as bad as the rest of them. Wouldn't say a single word.'

‘Closing ranks,' concluded Crosby, adding sedulously, ‘Do you think there might be any more of that chicken pie left, sir, if I was to go back to the kitchen and ask?'

‘Closing ranks against whom?' Sloan swept up the last mouthful on his own plate.

‘Couldn't say, I'm sure, sir.'

‘The Fearnshires versus the Rest?'

‘For the honour of the Regiment, probably,' said Crosby, only well read in certain highly selective areas of British military history. He regarded his own clean plate with satisfaction. ‘One thing, at least, the oldies don't have to worry about here is the food. It's good.'

‘They would seem, though,' said Sloan acidly, ‘to have plenty of other things to worry them. Like death, accidents and murder.'

‘No wonder they have an Escape Committee,' said Detective Constable Crosby lightly.

‘I'd forgotten about the Escape Committee,' admitted Sloan. That was just one more thing about the Manor that he hadn't really had time to go into yet. That wasn't meant as an excuse. It was only that in an ideal world, as one of his lecturers at the police training school always used to insist, good policemen should have all of the capabilities of the remontoir and he wasn't sure that he, Christopher Dennis Sloan, had half enough of them.

Then a young and keen Sloan, who had never even heard of the word, had waited for some other bright spark on the course to ask what it meant. He'd never forgotten the answer, delivered in the orotund tones of the lecturer – or its implications for an investigating officer.

‘It's the mechanism,' the man had said so pompously, ‘which regulates the power from the mainspring of a watch so that the force applied to the time-keeping element stays the same whether the instrument is nearly wound down or has just been wound up.' And he'd called them all ‘officers of the watch' for the rest of the day to ram the lesson well and truly home.

As far as Sloan was concerned today, he – working police officer – was now very nearly wound down and he wasn't sure if his efficiency had stayed exactly the same as it had been when he had begun that morning.

‘They'd need to get away from here once in a while, poor devils.' Crosby rose to his feet.

‘They would, indeed.' There was an escape mechanism on a watch, too, he remembered.

‘It's a proper God's waiting room, this place. I don't know about you, sir, but it gives me the willies.'

Time and tiredness, decided Sloan, were no excuse for detectives not following up each and every lead, even if the mainspring was running down. ‘Yes, Crosby,' he admitted. ‘I think I would want to get away once in a while, too, if I had landed here.'

‘If I was put in the Manor, sir, I think I'd just pop my clogs straight away and have done with it,' said Crosby insouciantly. ‘Even if I wasn't completely gaga by then.'

‘Easier said than done…' Sloan'd spoken casually enough but now he came to think about it … he pulled himself up with a jerk, something niggling at the back of his mind now.

‘Me, I shouldn't just hang about waiting for that chap with the scythe…' persisted Crosby.

‘The Grim Reaper.' Sloan made the connection without difficulty, his mind now suddenly switched to something Lisa Haines had said yesterday.

‘I think I'll just nip along, sir, and see the cook,' said Crosby, plate in hand.

Sloan wasn't listening. He was trying to remember exactly what it was that that selfsame cook had said yesterday about poor Mrs Forbes. It hadn't seemed important at the time but there was an entirely different construction which could be put on that simple sentence about a dying woman: ‘Of course,' Mrs Haines had said, ‘she could die at any time. She does know that.'

He sat quietly, alone in the Matron's pretty little sitting room, thinking about the words and their two entirely opposite interpretations. Suppose any one at the Manor could die whenever they wanted to …

There was a word for that.

Euthanasia.

Or two words.

Easy death.

Not, at the Manor, physician-assisted euthanasia, anyway, because Dr Angus Browne had refused to issue at least one death certificate – that for Maude Chalmers-Hyde.

That must mean something.

But what?

A hothouse of intrigue, that's what the Manor was, he decided. With undercurrents that he could feel but not see. And nobody here was going to tell him what they were. What was it that Crosby had said about closing ranks?

The door of the sitting room opened quietly but it was the Matron who came in. ‘I've got the addresses of Walter Bryant's two daughters for you, Inspector.'

‘Thank you.' That was something else that would need following up after Inspector Harpe's vehicle examiners had made their report on the brakes of Walter Bryant's wheelchair.

She hesitated. ‘Is there any news?'

‘Not yet,' he said. ‘But there will be. Old ladies always turn up sooner or later. Tell me,' went on Sloan, since anything – anything at all – might be useful at this stage, ‘what did Mrs McBeath's husband do in the war? Do you happen to know?'

‘I gather he was on the Staff.' Muriel Peden gave a faint smile. ‘I'm afraid the others didn't seem to hold the Staff in high esteem. I don't know why – but then I wasn't in the army in wartime.'

‘Because it's usually behind the front line, I expect,' said Sloan sapiently. ‘I suppose that's where the Brigadier was, too.'

She frowned. ‘I don't think so. He was at the Tinchel, I'm sure.'

A memory stirred in Sloan's mind. ‘He wasn't mentioned in the history.'

‘Really? Well, he was definitely there and,' she gave her faint smile again, ‘I can tell you he's in great fighting form now. Hazel's got him into bed at last but it wasn't easy. He won't say anything except that he wants to know where to find Lionel Powell.'

‘He's not the only one,' said Sloan astringently. ‘We're still looking, too … Tell me, Matron, which is Mrs Carruthers' room?'

*   *   *

‘Police.' Inspector Sloan introduced himself without preamble.

Mrs Carruthers was in bed, her son still reporting on what he could see from the window.

Ned Carruthers, for whom the police force had vague subconscious associations with the attacking of protesters trying to protect the environment, immediately went on the defensive. ‘You must remember that my mother's an old woman, Inspector,' he said. ‘She shouldn't be disturbed like this…'

Mrs Carruthers sat up, eyes bright with excitement. ‘What's happened now?'

Ned was undeflected in his protection of his mother. ‘After all, she only arrived at the Manor two days ago. She can't possibly be of any help to you with your enquiries.'

Maisie cut off this display of filial piety by saying briskly, ‘What is it you want to know, Inspector?'

‘I understand, madam, that you've known some of the residents here for a long time.'

‘A very long time,' she said with emphasis. She gave a mirthless laugh and added, ‘Man and boy, you might say.'

‘Including the late Mrs Powell?'

‘A great girl,' said Maisie reminiscently. ‘A great girl.'

‘Did you know her in Egypt?'

Mrs Carruthers nodded vigorously. ‘I'll say!'

Detective Inspector Sloan said, ‘After her first husband was killed?'

‘Yes.'

‘Did you know her second husband?'

‘Oh, yes.' She gave a high cackle. ‘That marriage didn't last. Never thought it would.'

‘Why not?'

‘He didn't have what it takes,' said the old lady succinctly.

‘Mother!' Ned Carruthers began another outraged protest.