A Late Phoenix (10 page)

“There's nothing wrong in that. What's his line?”

“Buying cheap and selling dear,” retorted the sergeant, “though,” he added thoughtfully, “I'd say not all his deals were as simple as that.”

“Clever,” decided Sloan, putting down the telephone.

He did not mean it as a compliment.

Gilbert Hodge gave Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby an equally cautious reception.

They found him in his builders' merchant's yard in his shirt sleeves. The shirt was not conspicuously clean: his fingernails were positively dirty. Two deeply ingrained lines ran from the corners of his mouth down into his chin. The rest of his face was pointed; sharp.

Somewhere not very far away a railway train shunted.

Sloan told him about the skeleton. “I expect you've heard already.”

He nodded. “Garton told me. He was round here.”

“We understand you own the site …”

“I do now. I didn't before. Bought it off Harold Waite when he decided to sling his hook.”

“Why?”

Hodge shrugged his shoulders. “Corner site. Bound to improve in value. Did a fair bit of that sort of buying at the time. People wanted to sell then.”

“You've had a long wait.”

Hodge grinned. His teeth weren't very good. “Haven't lost, Inspector.”

“The rest of the site …”

Hodge grinned again. “Mine. Bought it up as it came on the market. It's going to look nice. Reddley's made a good job of the plans. Did them himself. Shops with offices on top. Unusual design though. Didn't like it meself.”

“Oh?”

“Not my choice. Reddley's. He did something really fancy before but the council wouldn't wear it.”

“Really?” Sloan made a note of that.

Hodge jerked his shoulder. “Though don't ask me what that lot know about design.”

“No …”

“Anyway Reddley says you've got to keep up to date these days and he should know what he's talking about.”

Sloan nodded. Up to date meant concrete and glass and twiddly bits.

“But none of this here sculpture,” declared Hodge. “He wanted to put something on the wall. Symbolic, he called it.”

“Did he?” Symbolic wasn't a word that the police had a lot of use for. It was too popular with other people for that. People like psychiatrists and demonstrators.

“I told him,” said Hodge, “I wasn't having fancy bits of old iron dressed up as art. I'm old-fashioned meself.”

“Yes …”

“The scrap yard's the place for that.” He shrugged. “Still, the design can't be too bad. Three of the places are let already.”

Sloan nodded again. The proof of the commercial pudding was always in the eating—which made for a certain simplicity.

“This skeleton …” he said.

Hodge cocked his head to one side. “That's Garton's worry, Inspector. Not mine. He's building the place.”

“It's my worry, too,” said Sloan firmly, “and nobody's building anything until I've sorted it out.”

Hodge waved a hand. “I shan't press Garton …”

“He gets his stuff through you …”

Hodge bared his teeth again in a semblance of a smile. “Well, now, Inspector, you wouldn't expect him to get it from anyone else, would you?”

“No, Mr. Hodge, I don't know that I would.”

“And it's in the contract to make sure,” said Hodge with satisfaction. “Never was one for gentlemen's agreements meself.”

“No …” Sloan wouldn't have expected him to have been. You didn't get rich that way.

“That doesn't mean to say,” said Hodge cheerfully, “that Reddley isn't pressing him. If he's got three tenants already I expect he is.”

Sloan began to get a glimmer of why Garton seemed so anxious to please. He was caught between Reddley and Hodge for a start. He hoped he knew what he was doing because for Sloan's money both of the other two did.

“The Waite boys,” he said. “I suppose you know them too?”

“Lord, yes,” said Hodge. “We were all youngsters round here together. Harold was always stuffy but Leslie …” He leered at Sloan. “Leslie was a right lad.”

“We're on our way to see him now.”

The Tarts

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

“All missing persons, sir?”

“That's what I said.”

“Since 1941?”

“Since 1941,” said Sloan grimly. He'd got to start his routine somewhere and the bombing of the house was as good a beginning as any other.

He was talking to an elderly, dyspeptic and very, very slow constable in the records department of Berebury Police Station who was known as Lightning Brown while Detective Constable Crosby went in search of Leslie Waite's present address.

“It'll take a bit of time, sir,” said Lightning.

“I daresay,” said Sloan pleasantly.

“Had one last Friday night. A girl last seen thumbing a lift from a lorry on the London Road.”

“Not her.”

“Bank Holiday we had one that had had a row with her dad about coming home late. Hasn't been seen since.”

“Before then,” said Sloan evenly.

P.C. Lightning Brown started flicking through a file. Sloan didn't think he could have done it more slowly if he'd tried.

“Last November, sir, there was the treasurer of Corton's Christmas Club.”

“What happened to him?” asked Sloan in spite of himself.

“Don't rightly know, sir, but we found his clothes and a note on the cliffs above Kinnisport.” He sucked his lips expressively. “Funny how they always take their clothes off, isn't it?”

“Very.”

“In 1949,” said Lightning Brown in measured tones, “there was one of our dentists. Walked out one night and was never seen again.”

“Dull work, dentistry. Nothing but teeth all day.” Sloan thought of the dental picture that the pathologist would have waiting for him by now. Perhaps that would be a quicker way to a name than this.

“He wasn't the only one that night,” volunteered Lightning.

“No?”

“His girl went too.”

“His girl?”

The man scowled. “Chairside assistants they call themselves nowadays.”

“Quite.” Somehow Sloan didn't think the skeleton in Lamb Lane, however pregnant, was the dentist's chairside assistant but he would have to make sure. He took down the details. It would have been a different story if the dentist hadn't gone too.

Quite a different story.

He would have been much more interested then in the chair-side assistant missing since 1949. As Sloan saw it the bullet and the burial meant that someone wanted to stay.

Not go.

Wanted to stay badly enough to kill the lady in question before her baby was born and wanted to bury her so that nobody knew about either body or baby.

Therefore someone who had a stake in being in Berebury?

“Go on going back,” he commanded Lightning Brown.

“Two more hitches on the London Road. If only,” he said in a grumbling way, “they'd write. Save us a lot of bother.”

They never did.

Sloan knew that.

Whatever it was drove them away stopped them writing too. And those who were left at home could never see that. It was just those ties—or apron strings—or tentacles—that they wanted to break with in the first place. And having broken them didn't want to join them neatly together again with the knot of a letter or an address.

“Come home. All forgiven. Mum and Dad,” murmured Sloan.

“Fido pining,” said the old constable cynically.

“That'd bring 'em back quicker. Of course, there's not a lot here for some of them.”

Sloan could well believe that.

The bucolic calm of an English market town wasn't every teenager's idea of the perfect adolescent environment. Not that the Lamb Lane lady had been a teenager. Dr. Dabbe had been sure about that. By the time you were twenty-three or so you had sorted out what you did want … you didn't want a baby, of course, if you weren't married.

Especially in an English market town.

Especially then.

Lightning grunted. “That's not what I think. That's what their solicitors say when we catch one of them for doing a spot of the old wilful damage.”

“And what, may I ask, does the magistrate say to that?” enquired Sloan.

Nothing would surprise him about magistrates.

Nothing.

“Asks ever so politely if they wouldn't rather be given the church windows to smash. Must be more exciting, he says, cool like, to break colored glass than just the plain plate glass stuff in the High Street shop windows. Keen on damages, he is.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” said Sloan. Though where damages got you with the Dick's Dive mob he wouldn't know. If they didn't believe in wealth then fines were scarcely punishment. Possessing nothing which normal society valued made threatening to take it away so much hot air.

Trying to explain this to the superintendent had been wasted breath, too.

The disgruntled constable went back to his old files. “Then there was the war. You interested in the war, sir?”

“Yes,” said Sloan for the first time in his life.

“There were the deserters, of course. Always one or two of them making for home comforts. Premature demobilization with some of 'em. Wanted to get back.”

“And civilians missing after air raids?”

The constable shook his head. “Nobody like that unaccounted for, sir. Not here in Berebury.”

“Sure?”

P.C. Brown looked pained. “Dead sure, sir.”

“Not even after the Wednesday?”

“No. I was here myself, sir. I remember quite well.”

Sloan sighed. There were some people, of course, who were never going to get promotion. You could tell right from the start. Lightning Brown must have been one of them. Even as a young man.

“Nearest we came, sir, to a missing person or an unidentified body was a finger.”

“A finger?” For a moment Sloan wondered if he was having his leg pulled.

“That's right, Inspector. I was on duty that night. The Wednesday, During the raid a chap brought his finger in to me. All done up in a napkin, it was, the wrapping of parcels not 'aving been allowed as from the fourteenth of the month.”

“Nice for you.”

“Very. Seems as if he'd taken it to the first-aid post near the church and they said they couldn't do nothing with it on its own so to speak.”

“Quite.”

“So he popped it round to the mortuary …”

“Did he?”

“We were using the Italian ice cream parlor in River Street as a mortuary in those days, the bottom having fallen out of the market in a manner of speaking …”

“Yes?” Whoever had nicknamed Police Constable Brown “Lightning” had done a good day's work. Sloan hoped that he—whoever he was—had got promotion.

Constable Crosby came back, notebook in hand. He'd got Leslie Waite's address.

“Due,” went on P.C. Brown unhurriedly, “to a shortage at the time of both Italians and ice cream.”

“The finger,” prompted Sloan.

“The mortuary wouldn't touch it without a body belonging to it. Not their pigeon, they said. So he brought it round here to the station.”

“What did you do with it?” asked Sloan, fascinated in spite of his better judgement.

“Buried it beside Timoshenko out in the back yard.”

“Who was Timoshenko?” inevitably.

“The station cat. She was a lady cat as it happened, but this Russian general was very popular at the time.” Lightning Brown sniffed. “Next day another chap turns up and says the finger was his. He was one short naturally …”

“Naturally.” In a minute Sloan would get up and walk out. The Ancient Mariner had nothing on P.C. Brown.

“Seems as if he was chopping wood when Moaning Minnie went and the axe slipped. He'd nipped off to the hospital before this other chap came along.”

“And there was nobody else missing?”

“Nobody else, Inspector.” He shut the file. “Except a young lady who wrote from a well-known address north of the Border …”

“I'll buy it.”

“Gretna Green. I don't suppose you want to know about her.”

“Just for the record.” Sloan told Crosby to take down a Berebury name and address. “You never know.”

“It'll have changed again,” said Lightning Brown pessimistically. “That sort of marriage doesn't last.”

“Sir,” said Crosby as they left the Records Department, “who's Moaning Minnie?”

“A siren, Constable.”

“Is she, sir?”

“A warning siren,” he said swiftly. “Meaning danger overhead.”

Sloan stared out of the car windows as Crosby drove out of Berebury towards Kinnisport. He had no idea what the time was. The day had somehow slipped away, unmarked by food, unpunctuated by any clock. When he was going to eat next was anybody's guess.

So was where he was going to pluck information about an old bullet in an old body.

Before as he had gone about his business in Berebury he had merely been subconsciously aware of the casual intermingling of old and new houses and shops. Today Sloan looked at them with new eyes as he realized for the first time that this randomness was the randomness of bombing.

The new buildings—the postwar buildings—suddenly irritated him. They were an intrusion. He was only interested in old Berebury now. Then the police car swung away from angular unmellowed brick and overdone plate glass and out onto the main road west to Kinnisport.

Leslie Waite was obviously younger than his brother Harold. Younger and more carefree.

They ran him to earth shortly after opening time in a tiny fisherman's pub on the waterfront.

Already the little bar was crowded and noisy. “Let's try the table in the corner,” Waite shouted above the hubbub. “Quieter.”