A Late Phoenix (18 page)

“Yus,” he said. “I was in the A.R.P. all right. Air Raid Precautions they called it. If you ask me there was a lot of P. and no A.R. to begin with. But then it really got started and we had the air raids all right.”

He was a shrimp of a man, bright as button, with an wholly agreeable merriness about him. He knew all about the bodies on the Lamb Lane site. “Having a bit of trouble round there I hear …”

“You were there in the beginning,” began Sloan generally.

Alf White did not need a second invitation.

“I'll say,” he said. “That was a night, the Wednesday.”

Sloan nodded mechanically. Listening to Alf White had a place in detection. It came under the “stones and avenues” heading. If you worked for Superintendent Leeyes you left a stone unturned or an avenue unexplored at your peril.

“We didn't know where to go first,” said White. “I was attached to Post D round the corner. You know it, I expect, guv'nor. It's the hall where the Brownies meet now …”

There was an old saw pit in the village where Sloan had been born which, as hand sawing went out and motorcars came in, had, by much the same token, slipped into use as a garage inspection pit.

“… There's a pub down that street …”

“The Rose and Crown,” agreed Sloan. The Irish laborers might still be there for all he knew, waiting to get at the Lamb Lane site.

“They got that early on.” Alf grinned. “There were a fair number of Englishmen with Scotch accents about that night, I can tell you. Then after a bit the fire up at Corton's got going. It looked like five sunsets all rolled into one.” He shook his head. “We didn't need no torches while Corton's was burning.”

“No …”

“First chap we found was in the road right outside the Post. He was the greengrocer from the shop opposite the pub. We got him into the ambulance and he came round with a drop of something nice.” He grinned again. “And I don't mean blitz broth.”

“Blitz broth?”

“Soup.” Alf drew breath. “A proper comic was that greengrocer. Do you know he was back the next morning with ‘I have no pane, dear mother, now,' chalked on the boards where his windows had been.”

“That's the spirit,” said Sloan.

“We came by the church first,” said Alf, mentally retracing his steps with less difficulty than many a yesterday's witness. “That hadn't half caught it. The old vicar was standing in the churchyard looking at what was left. Charlie Hibbert—he was a bit of a wag, was Charlie—he called out, ‘I see we got a Leaning Tower now, too, Vicar,' but the old chap didn't take no notice. Do you know what he was doing?”

“No,” said Sloan. He knew what he himself should be doing. And it wasn't listening to Alf White. It was sitting down and thinking hard about who it was who had known all about an unborn baby, a bullet, and a body.

“He was standing,” said Alf White, “by one of the graves looking at the church and chanting something. It seemed so queer but proper churchlike at the same time. I've never forgotten it. ‘O ye fire and heat, Bless ye the Lord.'”

Detective Inspector Sloan, erstwhile choirboy, coughed and said, “It's from the Benedicite.”

“You don't say?” said Alf. “Well, Charlie said we'd better make sure the old boy hadn't gone round the twist so I went up to him. ‘Come, lovely Death,' he was saying as I got near to him. ‘Walt Whitman, Alf,' he said, but I hadn't time to stop really. He didn't last long after that—too many miles on the clock when the war started.”

“Lamb Lane,” said Sloan unwillingly, turning his mind from the vivid word picture sketched by the little man.

“A shambles,” said Alf promptly. “They said that they thought there was someone still in number two and so we started the digging and tapping routine. We never got no response and then someone turned up with a message that everyone had been accounted for after all. That would have been about two o'clock in the morning.”

“Tell me,' said Sloan, “if, after that, someone had wanted to bury a woman in the cellar, could they have got down there?”

Alf shook his head decisively. “No, guv'nor. Definitely not. Not unless he was a ruddy mole or something. All those houses were struck all of a heap, so to speak. You couldn't have got under anything until they were cleared.”

“What about after that?” The pathologist had said after that.

“After? Oh, it would have been quite easy after the top stuff had gone. You could have got down there and dug away to your heart's content.” He grinned. “It wouldn't even have upset the neighbors seeing as how there weren't any neighbors left to upset.”

“No one would notice a little bit of digging, of course,” murmured Sloan aloud. It had just come to him who would in all probability have known about the unborn baby—if not about the bullet and the body. Dr. Tarde. Unborn babies were a doctor's business.

“Notice?” Alf White grinned again. “There was so much digging and rubble shifting and people scrabbling about that I reckon you could have buried what you liked. Come to that, you could have parked what you liked in some of the ruins, too. The only risk was the kids finding it. Charlie—now he kept his black market …” Alf White suddenly recollected to whom he was speaking and his voice faded away.

“You've been a great help,” said Sloan, diplomatically deflecting the conversation. “What about your own house?”

“I did think it had had it when I got back and saw the street. You know, I didn't care very much at the time. Funny, really, when you think how cross I get if the paper boy kicks the fence.”

Sloan turned to go.

“It wasn't all bad, guv'nor. Wouldn't want you to think that. I met the missus fire-watching.” He poked Sloan in the ribs. “You couldn't think of a better place for courting. Not in a month of Sundays.”

“You must have had some bad days all the same,” said Sloan.

“I only got really worried the once,” confided the little man. “That was at the Whitsuntide Bank Holiday the year before.”

“What happened then?” asked Sloan curiously.

“It was the Council Offices …”

“The Council Offices?”

“That's right,” said Alf seriously. “They stayed open all the Bank Holiday weekend. I knew things must have been pretty bad for that—but as I used to say to the wife—everything has an end and a piece of string has two.” He brightened. “We A.R.P. people still have a reunion, Inspector, each year. If you was wanting to talk to any of the others—they haven't forgotten anything you know …”

Sloan went back to his office. He hadn't been there long when Crosby knocked on the door.

“Can I bring in those marriage certificates now, sir?”

“You can bring in the dancing girls,” growled Sloan, “if you think it's going to do any good.”

“From Somerset House, sir. Just arrived by special delivery. Notes on those marriages you asked me to get.” He brought them in, together with two cups of canteen tea. “Reinforcements for the inner man, too, sir.”

Sloan sighed. What he could have done with was reinforcements of quite another sort. Like a detective sergeant with a trained mind—ready, willing and able to help him sort out this impossible tangle of the old and the new. An officer with—what was it fashionable to call it these days? An officer with a low threshold of suspicion. At the very least a man with a mind above his stomach, who thought history began yesterday.

He picked up the first of the pile of records that Crosby had brought in. “I see Gilbert Arthur Hodge married Annie Briggs.”

“Did he?” said Crosby indifferently.

“And she,” said Sloan, “from the look of their respective addresses was the girl next door.”

“Not very enterprising,” agreed Crosby, reaching for the second one on the pile. “Listen to this, sir. Mark Reddley married Constance Blake-Mobberley, daughter of Godfrey Blake-Mobberley, F.R.I.B.A., consultant architect …”

“Well done that boy.” Sloan took a drink of tea. It was very welcome. He'd forgotten when he was next due to eat. “Who's next?”

Crosby pointed. “Number three. Garton.”

“Oh, yes. Here we are. Anthony Garton, son of Anthony Garton …”

“Garton and Garton,” said Crosby, “like their board says.”

“Anthony Garton,” said Sloan repressively, “married Winifred Grimston of Cullingoak.”

“Change the name and not the letter,” chanted Crosby, “change for worse and not for better.”

“I beg your pardon, Constable?”

“It's true, sir. You look at that woman I went to see this morning … the Gretna Green one.”

“Murgatroyd?” The Lamb Lane lady hadn't been her either.

“She's called Marshall now. It didn't do her any good.”

Sloan picked up the next paper. They were investigating a murder—two murders—not playing word games. “Miss Tyrell …”

“Miss Tyrell?”

“The General Register Office,” said Sloan austerely, “report that they are unable to trace any record of any marriage by Millicent Amy Tyrell.”

There was a hoot of merriment from Crosby. “You didn't think they would, did you, sir? Not with a face like that …”

“There's no art, Crosby, to find the mind's construction in the face.”

“Pardon, sir?”

“Nothing,” he said wearily. “It's a quotation. When I was a constable our instructor always used to begin his lectures with that.”

“Oh.”

“Lesson One it was, on people. To stop us judging them by their appearance.”

“Oh.”

“Lesson Two,” said Sloan grimly, “was not to rationalize the obvious.” There had been nothing in those lectures, though, about what you did when there wasn't any obvious. “And don't forget that even Miss Tyrell was young once.”

“Not her,” retorted Crosby. “I don't believe it.”

Crosby wasn't unsympathetic. It was one of the things which was making this case so difficult.

Just how did you begin to imagine what a middle-aged person had been like in the days of their youth? It was like looking at a flower in September and wondering about June. Sere, stringy leaves and dried-up seed pods didn't tell you anything about fresh green leaves and fine flowers.

Somehow, though, he still couldn't imagine Gilbert Hodge as a dashing young man—but both Garton and Reddley could have been good lookers once. He knew Leslie Waite had been because Miss Tyrell had told him so. Harold Waite—before he turned stocky—had probably looked quite well. Better than he did now, anyway.

Especially in uniform.

He said as much to Crosby.

“I expect,” said that worthy inarticulately, “that they were like themselves now but less so, if you know what I mean, sir.”

Even that was no great help when Sloan came to think about Dr. Tarde. He had never known what he had looked like. Older than the others anyway. And his wife had died young. In 1935, Somerset House said.

Sloan picked up the next paper.

“Harold Waite married Clara Hitchens, daughter of Herbert Hitchens, draper, of Shepherd Street, Berebury.”

“Biggest mistake he ever made, I'll bet,” pronounced Crosby, who was himself still seeking the perfect wife and who hadn't yet settled for someone he loved instead.

It wasn't Harold Waite's biggest mistake. He'd made a bigger mistake than that last night when he left Luston and came over to Berebury on his own. Sloan winced inwardly. He shouldn't have done that. He should have stayed in Luston.

“Fancy being spared for twenty-five years of Clara Hitchens,” said Crosby.

“And Leslie Waite,” went on Sloan, taking up the last paper of all off the desk, “married Freda Cowell of …” he stiffened suddenly. “Crosby, what was the name of that lady we saw Leslie Waite with last night …”

“That was no lady, sir,” responded Crosby immediately, “that was his …”

“Crosby!”

“Sorry, sir. Doreen, sir.”

“That,” said Sloan softly, “was what I thought it was, too.”

Gloves must be worn when gathering and preparing the nettles

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

“Get me Somerset House again,” commanded Sloan swiftly, “and get on to county headquarters at Calleford as quickly as you can and ask them to send a police launch out after that boat of Leslie Waite's at Kinnisport.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do we know what it's called?”

Crosby nodded. “
The Saucy Nancy
.”

Sloan hadn't time to wonder if that was significant or not before the town hall came through on the telephone in the person of a Mr. Mallinson.

“I understand you were asking about the bombing Inspector …”

“Yes, please,” said Sloan. It seemed like a hundred years ago at least when he had made his enquiry. It must have been yesterday.

“We don't have a civil defense department any more, Inspector.”

“I hope,” said Sloan politely, “that means you don't have any bombing either.”

The voice at the other end of the line said, “If you've only got four minutes …”

“Quite,” said Sloan. He didn't know himself what defenses there were against attack now that ramparts were out. England had run through them all in time—ditches, drawbridges, boiling oil, barbed wire, antiaircraft guns. Nobody had invented an aerial portcullis.

Mr. Mallinson said, “I don't know what'll happen next time, I'm sure.”

Neither did Sloan. As far as he could see four minutes would be long enough for Police Constable Lightning Brown to put his helmet on—but that was about all.

“I expect,” said Mallinson unenthusiastically, “that it'll all fall on us first …”

Sloan supposed it would, too, politics being what they were these days. Or had it stopped being “politics” and become “failed diplomacy” by the time the bombs began to drop?