A Presumption of Death (25 page)

‘Very few people hold out. I’m told we don’t touch them; it’s all done by cunning. But there are a few steadfast brave ones; and in the end we would hang spies,’ said Bungo.

‘It would be quite important to find out what he was spying on. Why he was here, you see. And now we can’t ask him,’ said Peter.

‘But even more important,’ said Bungo, ‘is not to let the enemy know he is dead. If they know he is dead they will replace him on whatever mission it was, and we will be in the dark about it.’

‘Well, how can I keep it secret?’ Superintendent Kirk cried, dismayed. ‘We’ve got a body come up in George Withers’s garden, and he was down the pub like streaked lightning yacking about it all. The whole place is buzzing with it.’

‘Do you reckon George Withers recognised the body?’ asked Peter.

‘I don’t think so. He only uncovered the feet, and then he came yelling for us.’

‘And after that you screened off the place, and took the body away under a sheet as per usual?’

‘Everything done according to the book, my lord.’

‘So the only people who know for certain
who
was found are those here present, and your constables? And I take it you can rely on secrecy from them if you solemnly require it?’

‘They know it’s as good as their job’s worth to talk behind their hands,’ said Kirk.

‘So far, so good,’ said Bungo.

‘Well it’s not very far, though, is it?’ cried Kirk. There’s got to be an inquest, and I’ve got to go around asking everybody all about it, and—’

‘Exactly. This is a serious problem,’ said Bungo. ‘I don’t suppose the enemy have a spy in the Crown. Of course if he had a local accomplice the report will have been sent back to his controller anyway, but if not we can do something. No detecting, Superintendent. We’ll make sure the coroner takes evidence of identification only. An RAF officer will appear to make the identification. The
Paggleham Crier
can report the inquest, but will happen to misspell the name of the deceased. Trinkhough, perhaps. Misheard by the reporter. That can be arranged.’

‘Can it indeed?’ said Peter.

‘In defence of freedom of speech,’ said Bungo, ‘we have considerable powers to suppress it.’

‘I still don’t understand,’ said Kirk. ‘Whoever it was my men have just dug out of George Withers’s pile of soil, somebody topped him. Somebody cut his jugular. Are you saying we don’t want to know who? If that’s the case, gentlemen, I’d like to know how I am supposed to prevent it from happening again. After all, this is the second murder in this out-of-the-way little place in the course of a couple of months. We’ll have a bloody massacre going on here if we don’t find the killer.’

‘Your earlier murder can’t have anything to do with this,’ said Bungo. ‘You detect that one all you like. For this one, we would like you to keep your head well down, and bear in mind that the death has to be kept as quiet as possible.’

Superintendent Kirk rather clearly wasn’t taking to Bungo, wasn’t liking this.

‘I haven’t got round to searching the cottage yet,’ he said, ‘what with being short-handed.’

‘Our people are searching it now,’ said Bungo.

‘And would they tell me what they found?’ asked Kirk.

Bungo’s silence hung in the air.

‘What if my chief is browned off with me for going slow and not getting anywhere?’ Kirk asked.

‘You won’t hear a word of complaint from him,’ said Bungo.

‘What if I won’t lie low like you say?’

‘You might find yourself off the case. Working in a different district. Helping to police trawlermen in Hoy.’

‘That’s enough, Bungo,’ said Peter. ‘Superintendent Kirk has his feelings. He wants to do his job properly, that’s all. You can’t blame him.’

‘Thank you, my lord,’ said Kirk. ‘Now if you gentlemen have finished with me, I’ll be getting along. I’ve some fire-watching to do tonight, and a long day tomorrow.’

Peter got up to show the Superintendent out, and Harriet followed him.

‘Sorry about this, Kirk,’ Peter said. ‘But look, your security clearance is better than mine. I’ll keep you filled in on what is going on.’

‘What’s getting overlooked here,’ said Kirk, taking his trilby from the hall-stand, ‘is that Brinklow was looking as if he had a bit of explaining to do about that other matter. How am I to investigate one without the other, that’s what I’d like to know? Because maybe that doesn’t have anything to do with this, but this may still have to do with that!’

‘What was that about?’ asked Peter, as they returned to the dining-room.

‘Wendy Percival, I imagine,’ said Harriet. ‘Two of the three young men who were attached to Wendy Percival threatened openly to kill her murderer if they found out who it was. And we hadn’t accounted for Brinklow on the night of the murder. Supposing one of them tumbled to that? Can Kirk even ask them where they were the night Brinklow was killed?’

‘Perhaps he’d better not,’ said Peter.

Bungo’s secretary was gathering his papers, closing his briefcase.

‘We’ll be off too,’ Bungo said, ‘and leave you to some well-earned peace. By the way, Flim, it’s good to see you. Bit of a close shave getting you back.’

‘Luck, mostly. And a neat bit of decipherment,’ said Lord Peter.

‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’, Anon
c
. 1776

The game of sardines seemed to be over, and Jerry was perched on a chair in the living-room, holding forth to an enraptured pair of small boys sitting on the floor in front of him, their arms round their drawn-up knees, composing a scene like Millais’s
The Boyhood of Raleigh
. Rather than pointing out to sea, Jerry was flying Charlie’s model plane around at arm’s length.

‘Is it as good as a car?’ asked Sam. ‘Is it as good as a Bugatti?’

‘Much, much better,’ Jerry said. His voice took on a tone of reverence, like a boy in love uttering his girl’s name. Peter quietly walked round the group, and sat down on the floor behind Charlie and Sam to listen. Smiling, Harriet chose the chair at her desk, set apart from the little tableau, and settled down to overhear.

‘Spitfires,’ Jerry said, ‘are just not like other planes.’

‘Are they faster?’ asked Sam.

‘Fastest kites in the air,’ said Jerry. ‘And the best acceleration, and the most manoeuvrable. Make other planes feel like municipal trams. But in a Spit you can out-fly anything.’

‘How far will they go?’ asked Charlie.

‘Ah, there’s the rub,’ said Jerry. ‘You could cruise carefully for maybe two hours – you’d have four hundred miles maximum. But if you got into a fight, Charlie, you’d need all the speed you could get, and you might have only forty-five minutes’ flying at combat speed.’

‘How do you make the guns go off?’ Sam asked.

‘There’s a neat little button under your right thumb as you hold the joystick,’ said Jerry.

‘I would of thought you might have had to aim your gun with your right hand, and do the flying with your left,’ offered Sam.

‘Oh, no, no,’ said Jerry. ‘To aim the guns you trim the plane itself – that’s why it matters so much that she flies like a bird – as though you
were
the bird, as though you
were
the plane. It isn’t like riding inside a machine, it’s like putting the plane on like an overcoat. Every move you make, every tiny movement of any part of you is connected so that she responds. She’ll respond by a fraction or by a big jump, depending on every twitch you make. She’s pure joy.’

‘Gosh,’ said Charlie. ‘Gosh!’

‘Where’s your parachute, Uncle Jerry?’ asked Sam.

‘You’re sitting on it,’ said Jerry. ‘It’s strapped to you, under your bum. It’s a tight fit. First time I’ve been glad not to be tall. Some chaps have to lower their seat right down on to the floor, and even then their heads are jammed against the cockpit cover. But I fit nicely. You’ve got the joystick between your knees, trimming with every tiny movement, back, forward, left and right; you hold it with your four fingers, and the gun-trigger is under your thumb. Your left hand is on the throttle, and your feet on the rudder pedals, and everything moves like velvet, gives you perfect responses. She’s as much under your control as your own body, your own legs and arms. Anything you ask, she delivers. So you soar, and you get between the bastards and the sun, and you dive on them from above, going like a gannet, you put her into a dive and she goes on and on speeding up, she’s not like a Hurricane with a maximum speed even when it’s falling like a stone.’

He fell silent, shaking his head slightly in amazement at his subject.

‘You can see that it’s a super shape, even when you can only look at them in the sky,’ offered Sam.

‘They are beautiful,’ said Jerry. ‘They have lovely curves. If you stroke one, you can feel little ridges where the plates of the skin overlap each other – and you know what? The lower plate overlaps the upper one, because she was designed by Mitchell and he was a sea-plane fellow.’

‘A man in love,’ said Peter to Harriet later. ‘When he talked about stroking it . . .’

‘What he didn’t mention,’ said Harriet, ‘was that his first love was and is danger. Danger and speed. Peter, I wish he were just a little bit frightened.’

‘I’m sure he is, really,’ said Peter. ‘But you can’t expect him to say so in front of the children.’

Superintendent Kirk was still rather glum and sulky when he appeared three days later to talk things over. Harriet had forgotten all about it. She had had three whole days of riotous behaviour, joyful children romping around with cousin Jerry and a laughingly indulgent father. There were two picnics, a swim, and a wild and wicked drive to the beach at Frinton. ‘A grateful country can spare me the petrol for that,’ Peter had said. ‘Is my journey really necessary? Let’s reason not the need. Let’s be superfluous. Children need seaside.’

They were all so light-headed that Polly asked if it was Christmas.

And then reality descended again with Jerry departing for another tour of duty, and the Superintendent standing disconsolately in the drawing-room, declining tea and biscuits.

‘What now? Is what I’ve come to ask you, my lady,’ said Superintendent Kirk. ‘Well, and Lord Peter too, if, as I suppose, you’ve filled him in. I’ve done my best, my lord, to muddy the water by putting it about that the body what we found was a tramp from up Walden way. I don’t like being wrong any more than the next man, my lord, and I’ll have to admit that I thought that talk of Brinklow being a spy was a load of old cod. In years of police work,’ he added, sounding plaintive, ‘all the clever ingenious explanations I have dealt with have been wrong. When you uncover it, it’s nearly always everyday stuff. Even murder. It’s always boring, and often squalid. But I seem to be wrong. The path. report says he has German teeth.’

‘What in hell are German teeth?’ asked Peter.

‘Very elaborate bridge work, with lots of gold, I understand,’ said Kirk. ‘Much superior to anything you could get done in England, the pathologist says. Well, he thinks you might find a refugee Jewish dentist in London who could do it, but some of the work is ten years old, so it isn’t likely.’

‘I should rather doubt if a German spy impersonating an RAF officer would like to go to a Jewish dentist,’ observed Peter.

‘He didn’t!’ exclaimed Harriet. ‘He wouldn’t go to a dentist at all; he had terrible toothache, and he said he was afraid of the drill or something. It was the talk of the village.’

‘There you are then,’ said Peter.

‘And something else,’ said Harriet. ‘There
was
someone who said he was a spy, and that was Mrs Spright, and she’s a retired dentist. She even said you could tell he was a spy every time he opened his mouth; and I didn’t take any notice because she was saying it about Miss Twitterton and the vicar and various other people as well.’

‘We must investigate Miss Twitterton,’ said Peter solemnly. ‘Is there anything else in the path. report that we ought to know, Superintendent?’

‘Deceased had been tied up,’ said Kirk.

‘Oh ho! Had he now?’

‘Weals round the ankles,’ said Kirk. ‘No swelling, so the pathologist doesn’t reckon he was tied for long. Angle of cut to the throat suggests an assailant of short stature, reaching up and from behind to deliver the blow. Hair soaked in blood. Various minor bruises and abrasions. Blood spotting on his uniform—’

‘What?’ said Peter sharply. ‘Spotting?’

‘It looks as though the death blow was part of a struggle,’ said Kirk.

‘You mean there was a second assailant?’ said Peter.

‘I don’t quite see . . .’

‘If the cut that killed him was from behind, and he was fighting somebody . . .’

‘I would say he had been overpowered in a struggle, and tied up.’

‘Hmm,’ said Peter. ‘It’s odd that he didn’t defend himself more effectively. Pseudo-Brinklow would certainly have been combat trained.’

‘Doesn’t that lead to the thought that it was another spy? Someone he trusted, who then ambushed him?’ asked Harriet.

Kirk shook his head unhappily. ‘Well, if it was our side come to arrest him, it’s hard to see—’

‘We can rule that out, I think,’ said Peter, ‘because our side would be so eager to interview him. Of course if someone puts up a very violent struggle I suppose . . .’

‘Could he have cut his own throat rather than submit to capture?’ asked Harriet.

‘We can ask the path. man; but it’s not an easy trick; and it’s that blood spotting on the uniform that’s worrying me.’

‘I can’t see why, my lord,’ said Kirk. ‘If there was a fight . . .’

‘A severed jugular?’ said Peter. ‘Blood-soaked hair? And the uniform not also soaked with blood? Where did the blood go? I mean if a corpse is found like that, there’s usually a pool of blood that gets mopped up in the victim’s clothing.’