Chapter and Hearse (25 page)

Kevin had got halfway down the path before he heard his grandfather shout after him. He turned back. ‘What is it, Grandad?'

‘I said that corporals are dangerous and don't you ever forget it.'

‘No, Grandad. I won't.'

‘Especially little ones…'

The person who looked most dangerous of all while the Corporal was going through his spiel was Private ‘Edge' Bates. Edge wasn't his real name. Private Bates was called this because of the time he spent sharpening his bayonet. No one, declared Edge Bates with monotonous frequency, was going to creep up behind him on a dark night without feeling the specially sharpened blade.

The Sergeant had been as full of dire warnings as the Corporal in what passed as his pep talk. ‘And remember, all of you, that should you happen to fall while you're on sentry go –' here he glared at them all in such a way as to make it quite clear that if they did fall to the ground it would be considered to be their own fault – ‘we shan't come and get you.' The Sergeant's eye travelled balefully up and down the serried ranks of men. ‘That clearly understood?'

Kevin's great-grandfather had been a stretcher bearer in France in 1915 at the bloody cock-up called Loos. He'd – if family legend was to be believed – always got his wounded man whatever the danger. It seemed a bit hard that, if Kevin was to fall at his post, he'd just be left there until the guard was changed.

Kevin didn't remember the stretcher bearer in the family himself because, although he'd survived the Battle of Loos, a German shell had had his name on it at the mudbath that became the bloodbath of Passchendaele.

Private Saffery's hands were already clammy now where he clutched his rifle. He concentrated on thinking about his name – their name. Saffery, his father said, came from the Arabic for sword – at least the first part, ‘
saifer
', did. That meant ‘
sword of
' and ‘
rey
' was Spanish for ‘king'.

‘So Saffery means “sword of the king”,' explained his father, whose own army service had been in the dull and disappointing years of peace. ‘Only in our case, we have queens.'

‘Yes, Dad.'

Saffery
père
had served his time in the army uneventfully and then taken a pub in the country. He was still a disappointed man, having learned to his cost that Mine Host cannot afford to voice opinions of his own, still less express them with real feeling – not and keep the inn's customers, anyway. He could – and would – though, presently tell all and sundry about his son's sentry duty.

And be proud of it.

The accent had been on pride too, when their officer had addressed them that morning, but Kevin, who had been up since before dawn ready for a full inspection and had not in any case slept well, scarcely listened to him. The officer had been talking about the Battle of Talavera, in which the alertness and devotion to duty of a sentry had apparently saved the East Calleshire Regiment from either the enemy or the wrath of the Duke of Wellington – Kevin wasn't sure which – and in any case thought those geese whose alarm call had saved Rome would probably have done the job just as well at the time.

And, whatever the officer had in his mind, talk of a soldier's duty conjured up only one picture in Kevin's mind. It was of an ancient painting, a copy of which had hung in the miserable church hall where he'd been sent to Sunday School as a child. The picture had been of a dismayed Roman soldier at Pompeii, watching the remorseless advance of burning lava from Mount Vesuvius heading in his direction. The caption had stayed with Kevin longer than any text or regulation. He could see it now: ‘Faithful unto death'.

His fingers were too slippery now to work properly should they need to, but that worry was succeeded by an even greater horror – he wanted to cough. A tickle somewhere at the back of his throat became a real threat to his stillness. He clamped his jaws shut and soon felt his eyes begin to bulge like a frog's. He would choke to death if he didn't open his mouth and cough soon …

It was then that he heard a whisper from the sentry on his right. Strictly forbidden, of course. The man would have been put on a charge if anyone had heard his warning.

‘Watch it. Here they come…'

And Private Kevin Saffery of the 2nd Battalion, the East Calleshire Regiment, froze as still as Niobe herself as the day's first coachload of foreign tourists spilled out into Whitehall, directly in front of the entrance to Horseguards' Parade, cameras at the ready.

Touch Not the Cat

They said, of course, that she should have had a dog. Not a great big dog that she couldn't handle at her time of life, nor one which needed long walks night and morning whatever the weather, which she obviously couldn't have managed, and certainly not the size of dog that ate a lot, things being what they were.

Or, at least, as they thought things were.

No, what the old lady could have done with, they said – afterwards, of course – was a small dog that barked. A barking dog, they thought, would have protected her in a way that a cat never could. They said – afterwards, of course – that having a dog might have saved her.

Well, someone modified this, at the very least it might have raised the alarm. That would have been something. Somebody, they said, might just have heard a dog barking in her cottage and gone to see what the trouble was. A small dog like a chihuahua, say, or a little terrier. Everyone else's small dogs always seemed to be barking when anyone came to the door. Why hadn't she had one too, just to be on the safe side? After all, Almstone was a pretty remote little village and there weren't all that many people about there after dark these days.

They all knew the answer to why she hadn't had a dog, of course. Mrs Doughty had a cat.

But a dog would have helped.

And Mr Mackenzie next door, although both very deaf and very Scottish, might have heard a dog barking. In the event – the sad event – it had been Mr Mackenzie who had found her afterwards. On account of the milk bottles not having been taken in, that was, and very upset about it, he had been.

Old Mrs Doughty hadn't had a dog not only because she had a cat but also because she had always insisted that her cat would take care of her.

‘Pusskins will look after me,' the old lady had said time and again, stroking the rather bad-tempered black and white moggie. ‘Won't you, my lovely?'

Pusskins, who never miaowed except at mealtimes, would arch his back and allow her to rub behind his good ear. (The other had come to grief in a memorable encounter with a ginger tom in the alley on the other side of the cottage.)

It was a great-nephew, full of undesirable book learning, who had first said that Pusskins was the old lady's familiar. He'd always thought of his great-aunt as a witch anyway, probably because she didn't wash overmuch.

His mother, who hadn't quite understood his meaning, told him not to be so forward. At the time she had had high hopes of a bracket clock that had stood on the cottage mantelpiece (without going) for as long as she could remember. As she was to tell the other relations again and again, the clock had been promised …

Familiar or not, Pusskins was therefore eyed warily while Mrs Doughty's relations consoled themselves in the way that relations will – afterwards, of course – with saying things to each other such as, ‘You didn't get to her age and go on living alone without having a mind of your own,' and, ‘If she didn't want a dog on account of having that mangy old cat, then that was that, wasn't it?'

That had certainly been that in the old lady's cottage when the burglar had come and gone. That is, the police were fairly sure that he had come only as a burglar. What was unfortunately undeniable was that, though he might have come only as burglar, he had indubitably left as a murderer as well.

What was equally obvious was that the cat had not been able to protect his mistress after all. The police as well as the relations knew Pusskins had done his best, of course, because not only was there the old lady's blood everywhere in the little cottage but, most interestingly, the police said, there was also blood – human blood, that wasn't hers – on Pusskins's claws as well.

It was a young detective constable from Berebury called Crosby, who manifestly hadn't enjoyed the sight of an elderly bludgeoned head, who had first turned his wayward attention to the cat and noticed some blood there. He had even managed to get a sample of it before Pusskins – a preternaturally clean member of his species, in spite of his battered appearance – could lick it off his paws.

Which the cat had promptly tried to do.

‘Be careful, Crosby,' Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan had adjured, seeing him with the cat. ‘It might turn nasty.' It was he who, for his sins, was in charge of the murder inquiry.

‘Yes, sir,' the young Constable had said, promising to take every precaution, while remarking inconsequentially that Captain Hook had killed himself by scratching behind his ear with the wrong hand.

‘Nature red in tooth and claw,' was what the clever great-nephew had said when he heard about it.

His mother hadn't liked that remark either.

‘And when you've finished with the animal welfare side,' the senior policeman had said to Detective Constable Crosby with some asperity, ‘you can come and give me a hand over here while we establish a common entrance.'

Common entrance, Detective Constable Crosby had learned early on, was not only an entrance examination for children going to public schools but a safe route established by the police at a murder scene for all those professionals in homicide who have to approach the body, and, having their lawful business there, mustn't accidentally destroy important evidence in the process.

‘And you'd better look sharp, Crosby,' said Detective Inspector Sloan. ‘The photograph boys'll be here any minute now and Dr Dabbe doesn't hang about when he's at the wheel either.'

*   *   *

Dr Dabbe, the Consultant Pathologist to the Berebury Hospitals Trust, readily gave it as his considered opinion that the cause of Mrs Doughty's death was a fracture of the base of the skull brought about by the application of a blunt instrument from above and behind.

‘A heavy blunt instrument,' he added after a closer examination of Mrs Doughty's head.

‘Anything you can tell us about the person who used it, doctor?' asked Detective Inspector Sloan carefully. When he was a lad, the use of heavy blunt instruments as murder weapons had been thought to be an exclusively male province, but you could never tell these days.

‘Anyone with the ability to lift a club hammer,' said the pathologist briefly.

Sloan just managed not to remark that that narrowed the field nicely and asked the doctor a few questions on haematology instead.

But, as Detective Inspector Sloan presently explained to the family, who, though they might have been a bit slow to visit while the old lady was alive, had assembled quickly enough when they heard that she was dead, what help was a cat's scratch on a man unless it happened to be on his face and needed explaining away?

The blood sample, the Inspector explained to them and to a slightly crestfallen Detective Constable Crosby, would become important only if they were able to catch the man from whom it had come – and that, he had to remind them, was not necessarily going to be easy. Blood there was, and that in plenty; other clues there were not. Someone had come and robbed and killed and gone, and that was all anyone in authority could tell them at this stage.

As well as the relatives, there had also been the next-door neighbour, Mr Mackenzie, to question, comfort, inform, pacify … and take a statement from. Detective Inspector Sloan was never entirely clear about the actual role of a police officer in these circumstances. He knew the theoretical one backwards. Members of the Criminal Investigation Department of every constabulary were there to investigate criminal occurrences, but, like a lot of life, it seldom worked out quite as simply as that. He'd long ago come to terms with the fact that a policeman had nearly as many parts to play in life as the seven ages of Shakespeare's man.

And some of them were not so easy.

What did you say to an apparently rational neighbour at a murder scene whose main concern was an archaic, not to say primitive, belief that it portended misfortune if a cat were permitted to leap over a corpse?

‘I think, sir,' he said to Mr Mackenzie as kindly as he could, ‘that these days that is just felt to be superstition. I can't see what further injury a cat could possibly do to a dead body already damaged almost beyond recognition.'

Sloan knew, of course, as well as everyone else, of the hundred and one uses of a dead cat, but that was something quite different.

Mr Mackenzie insisted that this fear was a real one and not just what he had the honesty to call a ‘fret' on his part. ‘Why, man, do ye no' realize that a watch was kept over a corp' in Scotland in the old days expressly to stop something like that happening?'

‘No, sir.'

‘Funny things, cats,' mused Mr Mackenzie. ‘You never know what they're thinking.'

‘Just so,' agreed Sloan, meticulously making another point, ‘but we don't know for certain whether – er – the animal in question did actually jump over the late Mrs Doughty, do we, sir?'

All Sloan hoped was that this subject never ever came up in Superintendent Leeyes's presence. Ever since the Superintendent had attended an evening class on ‘Physics for Everyman' he had been trying to explain something called ‘Dead Cat Bounce' to the entire constabulary.

Without success.

Pusskins, his paws now decently clean, was present at this family and friends conference. In fact, he stared at Mr Mackenzie as balefully as Detective Inspector Sloan would have liked to have done, but the latter had his pension to think of.