A Late Phoenix (16 page)

“Quite.” Sloan cleared his throat. “A sort of epitaph for a raid that, sir, wouldn't you say?”

He stood by while the pathologist went about his work. The scene in Lamb Lane was almost exactly the same as it had been on the Monday. The only real sign of change and progress—the great yellow articulated digger—had gone.

“Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new,” murmured Sloan ironically to himself. He'd liked learning poetry at school. English poetry.

Otherwise what he saw at the site was the same save for the swarming police. The timbers still shored up the adjacent house. The narrow, neglected gardens still ran away from the ruins. Desolation was still the order of the day. What difference there was between then and now lay in the minds of the policemen who were there. Before, their view of the site had merely been the beginning of a new job. Now, they were investigating an old death and a new one.

With undertones of war.

And overtones of murder.

Gilbert Hodge was half-sitting, half-lying on Dr. Latimer's surgery couch. He was holding a measuring glass containing a chalky-looking mixture in one hand. His other hand was covering part of his tummy. His face was about as pallid as the medicine he was taking.

A white-coated Miss Tyrell was standing by. Dr. Latimer was washing his hands. He waved Sloan in with a towel and said, “Would I be right in thinking, Inspector, that I lost my watch in the cause of verisimilitude?”

“I think so,” said Sloan cautiously. “Local color.”

“It was a good watch.”

Sloan cleared his throat. “You could consider yourself lucky you—er—didn't see what hit you.”

“Point taken,” said Latimer thoughtfully. “It was dirty work at the crossroads all right. I was luckier than that poor devil.”

Gilbert Hodge stirred. “You'd called your dogs off, Inspector …”

“P.C. Cresswell has other duties today, sir.” Actually he'd gone—protesting—to be a traffic light at the Market Place crossroads. Wednesday, the station sergeant had underlined the word heavily, being Market Day. Not so much, he had added gloomily, that they kept the traffic moving, but they did manage to stop it rusting out where it stood. “Not that having the site guarded would have made a lot of difference.”

“No.” Hodge shrugged. “Someone had it in for old Harold. You don't get hit like that for nothing.”

“No, sir.” Sloan could guess easily enough why Waite had been killed. “Are you feeling well enough to make a statement about finding him?”

He was but it didn't tell Sloan anything new.

“And you knew him well enough in the old days?”

“We were all part of the same bunch. You think you know people well when you play around with them but you don't.”

Sloan agreed with him there. It wasn't play which revealed people.

“And we were all young at the time,” said Hodge.

“Yes.” The lady in Lamb Lane had been young, too.

“And there was a war on.”

“Yes.”

“You took your fun where you could get it.”

“Yes.” That certainly applied to the lady in Lamb Lane. Unless he was a Dutchman.

“The old doctor might have been able to help you,” said Latimer.

“But he's dead, sir.”

Harold Waite would have been able to help too. But he was dead.

Too.

“What about records?” suggested William helpfully, waving his hand towards the banked rows of patients' medical cards. “You must have records, Inspector, just like I've got.”

Upon the instant Miss Tyrell surged across the consulting room towards the records, putting herself between them and everyone else. “But these are confidential …”

“We've got some records,” admitted Sloan, “but not cradle to grave stuff. We haven't got everyone taped.”

“Just the sinners,” said William. His head was beginning to ache again?

“Yes, sir.” Sloan coughed. “I understand it serves us very well.”

“If you wait a year or two,” said William, “you'll be having my records and I'll be having yours.”

“Really?” Sloan got ready to go. Gilbert Hodge hadn't anything useful to tell him. Or if he had, he wasn't going to.

“Someone once said we'll end up by putting ill people in prison and criminals in hospitals.”

“It wouldn't surprise me, sir,” said Sloan stolidly.

“Not nowadays, it wouldn't.” He turned to Hodge.

“We'll be seeing you again later today, sir, if you don't mind but just for the record you hadn't seen Harold Waite in years …”

Hodge nodded. His color was a little better now but not much. “That's right. Not Harold.”

“Not Harold?” quickly.

“Leslie,” said Hodge. “I saw him only the other day.”

“When?”

“Sometime last week, it would have been.” Hodge scratched his head. “Thursday. No, not Thursday. Friday, it was. In the evening.”

Boil all the ingredients together for five minutes

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

“Say that again, Sloan,” commanded the superintendent crossly. “Someone has done what?”

“Killed Harold Waite.” Sloan had borrowed Dr. Latimer's telephone in Field House to ring in to the police station. “I want his brother brought over from Kinnisport, please.”

“That's bad, Sloan. The chief constable isn't going to like it when he hears.”

“No, sir.” Neither, of course, would Clara Waite when she did. He'd given the zealous Sergeant Pritchard of Luston that job. Praise be.

“Then there
had
been some monkeying about on that site,” snapped Leeyes. No one could have called him slow.

“Someone,” said Sloan more succinctly, “altered Mr. Fowkes's pegged out site lines on Friday night so that Rigden and his friends shouldn't dig just where the skeleton was.”

He grunted. “Trying to make sure she was never found.”

“Yes, sir. And now they've made sure Harold Waite can't tell us who she was either.”

“He knew, of course.”

“It definitely rang a bell with him,” admitted Sloan, “I saw it …”

“
The Bells, The Bells,
” chanted Leeyes down the telephone.

“Beg pardon, sir?”

“A case where the chap let the murder prey on his mind.”

“I don't remember that one, sir.”

“I told you about it at the time. Quite a good tale, really.”

Then it came back to Sloan.

It had been in what had gone down in history at Berebury Police Station as the winter of French Literature.

Each week the morning after the superintendent's Adult Education Class, Sloan had been subjected to a rehash of the lecture. Even now he could remember them. Balzac, Racine, Molière, Maupassant, Lamartine, Proust … especially Proust.

Proust was the one the superintendent was said to brood about nowadays when he sat and watched Dick's Dive across the Market Square.

“The murderer there,” went on Leeyes, “escaped the gallows but was destroyed by his own conscience.”

“I haven't seen any signs of that anywhere yet, sir.” Not in those poor gray bones: certainly not in Harold Waite's crushed skull.

Leeyes grunted. “That's the trouble with this case, Sloan. You don't know what you're looking for.”

“Not yet, sir.” Sloan started to marshall what he did know about who he was looking for.

Or could guess.

Someone who wasn't free to marry at the time of the first murder. Or who didn't want to. A man, of course. Shooting was a man's crime. So was killing mothers-to-be.

Someone who had been around at the time, obviously. And that wasn't the easiest of things to establish after so long. Someone who had been around on Friday night. And last night.

“He'll be middle-aged by now,” said Leeyes.

“I suppose he will.” And just what did that signify? Hot blood grown cool, perhaps … cool and calculating: because if one thing was certain it was that most men became more calculating with the passing years. Sad but true. And there had been plenty of passing years in which to calculate the risks inherent in that buried body. He hesitated. “It's a long time to live with a thing like that, sir. It might have made its mark—like in that chap you've just told me about.”

“Good for him,” declared Leeyes, performing a neat verbal
volte face
.

“I beg your pardon sir?”

“Good for him,” repeated the superintendent robustly. “Nietzsche said so.”

“Did he, sir?”

Nietzsche.

Sloan recognized that straightaway.

From the winter after French Literature.

Psychology Today.

When the superintendent had upset all the lady cleaners at the police station by following them around and asking them what they did with the contents of their dustbins. It had been by far the most disruptive of all the Adult Education classes that the superintendent had been to.

“‘Build your houses by Vesuvius,' Sloan,” said Leeyes. “That's what he used to say to people.”

“Really, sir? He didn't mean the volcano, did he?” Sloan was wondering now if Gilbert Hodge's ulcer had a place in this sorry story.

“Of course he did. That's the whole point.”

“Why, sir?” Detective Inspector Sloan, that prudent husband, householder, and rose-grower, would have as soon as dreamt of building his house upon sand.

The superintendent said, “He thought people should lead exposed and therefore heightened lives.”

“Was he alive in the last war, sir?”

“What's that got to do with it?”

“I just wondered if he'd ever been bombed.”

“No, of course not,” snapped Leeyes. “He was dead by then.”

“I see, sir.” He cleared his throat. “Well, whoever—er—did for this young woman had plenty of this sort of life you were talking about. And he's going to have a bit more now. I hope he enjoys it.”

“I expect he's got used to it, Sloan. Even that fellow who hung about under that sword hanging by a hair …”

“Damocles, sir?”

“Him,” said Leeyes grandly. “I expect he learned to live with it after a bit.”

Sloan gathered up Crosby and left Field House.

Neither French Literature nor international psychology was going to solve this case.

Just routine. Like talking to the man who lived next door to the bomb site, who might have heard something in the night.

They found him leaning over his garden fence watching the police activity with interest.

“Lived here long?” began Sloan generally. It didn't do to rush the old and retired. They liked to take their time.

“All me life,” wheezed the old chap. “Bert Jackson's the name. Anyone'll tell you. Born, bred, and wed here, if that's what you mean by long.” He spat expertly over the fence. “And all but dead here too more than once.”

“Last night,” said Sloan. “Can you tell us anything about last night or about last Friday night …

“Wednesday it was,” said Jackson. “Not Friday. The Wednesday. Thought I'd had it that night.” He coughed. “They used to say, you know, if you heard it coming it wasn't yours …”

“Did they?” This was worse than French Literature or Psychology Today. This was historical reminiscence in the first person singular.

“All my eye,” said Jackson vigorously. “Besides—how could they prove it? Tell me that.”

“Difficult,” agreed Sloan. “Now, about last night …”

“Difficult? Impossible! Like with this one on the Wednesday. I 'eard it all right. Started as a whine and sort of rose to a whistle. That's when I took the hint and went down by the doctor's garden wall, over there—see?”

Sloan obediently swiveled round and took a look at the dwarf retaining wall in front of Field House.

“Mind you, mate, I didn't hear the actual bang.”

“No?”

“Just felt as if I'd been clobbered all over with a sand bag. No pain. The pavement”—he wheezed—“the pavement seemed to come alive just like one of them things kiddies bounce on at school. What do you call 'em?”

“Trampolines?”

“That's right. One of them. Ground rushed up to meet me.” He coughed again. “I rushed down to meet the ground.”

“Nasty,” said Sloan. Perhaps they could get to the point soon …

Bert Jackson sucked in his breath. “So was the next thing, mate. Funniest feeling I've ever felt. Like as if I'd got one them magnets inside me that was pulling me inwards until I was the size of a pinhead.”

“You don't say.”

Jackson spat over the wall again. “Dr. Tarde, he said afterwards that was the effect of the vacuum from the blast on me lungs.”

“Really?'

“That wasn't all.”

“No?” Sloan hadn't thought for a single moment that it would be. It wouldn't be often now that the old chap got a chance to tell his bomb story to a new audience.

“No. After that there was this almighty roar.”

“Another bomb?”

“No. Same bomb. All the earth what had gone up in the air decided to turn round and come down again.”

“And buried you?” suggested Sloan.

“Nearly. Took me a tidy time to shake it off I can tell you. Then I thought I'd gone blind. Everything was black.” He spat again with remarkable precision. “Dust and dirt. Couldn't see the moon any more. And as for the smell of exploded powder …”

“Quite.”

“First thing I did was to look where the bomb fell …”

“Naturally.” Yesterday Sloan would have been keenly interested. Anything about the bombing which might have led them towards the unknown woman would have been a help. But now they had something more positive still. The late Harold Waite.

Jackson waved a hand at the bomb site. “Nothing much left of these four, I can tell you. And my own house looked as shaky as I felt.” He coughed. “I got down to our shelter over there …”