Little Knell (16 page)

‘Not the boyfriend?' Leeyes sounded disappointed.

‘We don't have any definite evidence as yet either way as to that, sir.'

‘Circumstantial will do at a pinch,' said his superior officer with a fine disregard for the niceties of the law.

‘As far as I can see, sir, there would have been no call for Colin Thornhill – that's the boyfriend – to go into Whimbrel House, eject a mummy from its case and put the girl in there instead,' said Sloan patiently, ‘and then tell the coroner about it, when he could have just dumped her in the woods somewhere instead. She could have been missing for months if he had, and the trail gone cold.' He drew breath. ‘But we'll be running some drug tests on him anyway.'

‘Murder is bizarre,' pronounced Leeyes grandly. The superintendent gave one of his prodigious frowns. ‘You never know where you are with either murder or drugs, Sloan. Remember that. No two manifestations are ever quite the same.'

‘All drug dealers are nothing more than human vampires,' said Sloan heatedly, the image of Peter Caversham still with him. He knew that not all murderers were: quite often the Family Support Officers would report back to those investigating the crime that the real victim was the individual who had committed the murder – someone driven to do their nearest and dearest to death by the very person whom they'd killed.

The superintendent came back smartly with the observation that detachment was an important part of police professionalism and that Sloan shouldn't ever forget it.

‘Drug dealers are bloodsuckers who make people dependent on them, sir; and then exploit their victims mercilessly until they haven't a drop of blood left in their veins or a penny in the bank,' said Sloan unrepentantly. He had been struck suddenly by the dealers' resemblance to the ichneumon fly but decided not to mention it.

‘You can touch bottom very quickly on some substances,' conceded the superintendent, who only had a second gin and tonic at the golf club on Sunday mornings if it was offered to him by someone else.

‘But heroin's the quickest by far,' said Sloan, explaining about Peter Caversham. ‘We shall need to interview him when he's…' Sloan paused, casting about in his mind for the right word.

‘No use putting “him in the longboat 'till he's sober” then?' interrupted Leeyes, on an unusually jovial note.

‘Sentient,' finished Detective Inspector Sloan triumphantly. ‘But it may be some time before he comes round and rejoins the human race. I've asked the local people there to keep an eye if he wakes up and walks out of the hospital.'

The superintendent said he was glad to hear it. ‘It wouldn't do for ill to befall the man, Sloan, while there is an investigation in progress.'

‘No, sir.' He hesitated. ‘He may have been picked out as a suitable victim … Selected to be turned into an addict, I mean.'

‘This Peter Caversham?'

‘He had a sporting chance of inheriting the Caversham estate,' said Sloan. ‘And he may have been the one who steered the drugs people to the empty house.' All the options would have to be explored. That was what police work was about.

‘Money talks,' said Leeyes elliptically.

‘We don't know whether he knew about it being empty, since the colonel wouldn't have him anywhere near the place, or,' he added significantly, ‘whether anyone else did, and if so, who.'

Leeyes grunted.

‘It has been established, sir, that those likely to inherit big money become the especial targets of drug dealers.'

The superintendent nodded at this. ‘They say the Earl of Ornum has kicked his eldest son into touch.'

‘Sir?'

‘Stopped him inheriting a penny until he's twenty-five.'

‘So,' said Sloan drily, ‘all he has to do is to stay clean until then.'

‘We can only hope,' the superintendent added with heavy irony, ‘that he went to the right school.'

‘I dare say the pushers pick out their prey quite as carefully as a stalking tiger does,' said Sloan. ‘With no holds barred.'

Leeyes drummed his fingers on his desk. ‘And in the meantime?'

‘In the meantime, sir, I have put the rose bushes in tubs on the patio outside the back of my house in full view of anyone who cares to take a look over the back fence, and told – that is asked – my wife to accept any further deliveries that come.'

‘That's all you can do, Sloan.' One winter the superintendent had attended an adult education class on Twentieth-Century British Prime Ministers. For some unfathomable reason it had been Herbert Henry Asquith who had taken his fancy. He had quoted the great man's favourite remark ever since. He did so now. ‘Wait and see.'

‘And told my wife to accept any other deliveries that may come,' repeated Sloan, ‘but not on any account to open them.'

*   *   *

‘We have a few more questions further to our inquiries into the death of Jill Carter,' Detective Inspector Sloan announced with a certain formality at the offices of Pearson, Worrow and Gisby. ‘We should like to see both partners.'

Detective Constable Crosby was quite taken aback when they were shown into the firm's interview room. ‘Better than ours, sir.'

‘It's the carpet that does it,' murmured Sloan absently.

The two accountants reached the room together, both professing a willingness to help the police with their inquiries in any way they could. But naturally, they insisted.

Sloan was well aware that normal police custom and practice – let alone PACE rules – held that persons being interviewed should be accompanied by their legal adviser and no one else; and certainly not be spoken to together with someone else who was also due to be questioned. This was because, when two or more persons were involved in an inquiry, the resulting separate statements could then be compared for any disparities.

It was what his mother, that staunch churchwoman, always called the ‘Susannah and the elders method, dear'.

Like the Prophet Daniel in the Apocrypha, the detective branch were great on spotting disparities between witness statements. Disparities led the police straight to what their press office always called ‘Further inquiries', which was public relations-speak for: Watch this space: more to come.

There was another school of thought, though, and Sloan belonged to it: question two people at the same time about the same thing and tensions arose. Palpable tensions could sometimes be very significant.

‘There are things we need to know,' he began now.

This was not an official interview.

Yet.

This was the police seeking information. And this was one detective inspector very anxious indeed to observe the byplay between two men, and a detective constable not interested in anything very much. The partners were two men one or both of whom might just possibly know a great deal more about: the late Jill Carter; a consignment of heroin that had fallen into official hands; a drug addict called Peter Caversham; or even the Lake Ryrie Project in the faraway Kingdom of Lasserta.

Detective Inspector Sloan was prepared to concede that it was equally possible that one man knew and the other man might suspect, but not know, something about one or all of these. And either man, though he did not himself know about any of these things, might perhaps suspect that his partner did.

That might emerge, too.

Sloan began his questions with the Lake Ryrie Project, and was aware that both accountants immediately relaxed. It wasn't anything at Lake Ryrie then, that they had been expecting the two policemen to come to see them about.

‘Yes,' said Jim Pearson, looking puzzled. ‘We audit the British end of their balance sheet – such as it is. We only charge them a nominal fee. They're one of Howard Air's good causes; he does a lot of charity work.'

‘Theirs is one of the accounts our David Barton has always handled, but he's been out of action since his car accident,' put in Nigel Worrow, manifestly untroubled. ‘I expect it's one of the little jobs that poor Jill picked up when she came to us. She was only a trainee, you know, so she only had small accounts to handle.'

‘Not a lot of money involved in the Lake Ryrie Project anyway, in spite of Howard Air's best efforts,' said Jim Pearson, dismissively. ‘People would rather give to the Animal Rescue place at Edsway. They like to see where their money's going.'

‘I don't blame them,' came in Detective Constable Crosby, stoutly. His own early contacts with human cupidity had left him surprised at how many people took financial matters on trust.

‘I rather think I signed them off myself,' said Worrow vaguely. ‘Can't be sure, though.'

‘How does the actual money get out there?' asked Sloan.

‘Oh, the Calleford and County Bank'll do all that for them,' said Pearson. ‘No problem.'

‘They'll do the conversion from sterling into that odd currency they have out there easily enough,' supplemented his partner. ‘I can't remember what it is…'

‘Lemps,' said Jim Pearson, still visibly untroubled.

‘We will obviously need a list of all clients whose accounts Jill Carter was working on.' Detective Inspector Sloan shifted his ground, seeking another, more sensitive area to probe.

‘No problem,' repeated Jim Pearson helpfully. ‘We didn't put any of the really difficult stuff her way, of course, just the routine, run-of-the-mill accounts.'

‘The bread-and-butter ones,' agreed Worrow.

‘Is there anything else you need, Inspector?' asked Pearson.

‘Whatever you have on record about Peter Caversham,' said Sloan, his eyes apparently studiously downcast. They weren't so downcast though for him to be unaware of the reaction he'd provoked. On the contrary.

Worrow stiffened at once and exchanged a swift glance with his partner. ‘That's quite different, Inspector. We'd have to have our client's say-so before we disclosed anything about his finances to anyone.' He appealed to his partner. ‘Wouldn't we, Jim?'

‘That or a court order, Inspector,' said Jim Pearson, suddenly more formal himself. ‘We couldn't agree to a fishing expedition.'

‘You wouldn't happen to have Horace Boller on your books, by any chance, would you?' asked Crosby, out of the blue.

‘The boatman at Edsway?' Nigel Worrow gave a hollow laugh. ‘Not likely. I shouldn't think he's got two pennies to rub together.'

‘Oh, I don't know…' objected his partner. ‘It would never surprise me if old Horace hadn't got a nest egg somewhere. Appearances can be deceptive.'

‘Not him, Jim, surely…'

‘Mind you.' Pearson grimaced. ‘I don't see him as a taxpayer, somehow.'

Worrow essayed a thin smile. ‘Not his style, I grant you.'

Two of the many things Detective Inspector Sloan had learned in a long career in the police force were that the chemistry of social interaction wasn't deceptive, and that body language seldom lied. Even the ancients knew that. The Pinocchio effect – the nose that lengthened with each succeeding lie – had been founded on fact, after all. The nose did swell when a man lied. Antihistamines or something. So that medieval headpiece with the long nose, reserved for liars, had been grounded in pure and simple observation by his detective antecedents. He pulled himself together.

Nigel Worrow hadn't liked what Jim Pearson had said about Horace Boller one little bit, and neither Nigel Worrow nor Jim Pearson had relished any mention at all of Peter Caversham.

On the way back to the police station Sloan idly asked Crosby what he had made of the firm of Pearson, Worrow and Gisby.

‘I bet that they even charge you for sneezing,' said that detective constable, oblivious to undercurrents and hidden agendas alike.

Chapter Fourteen

Used

‘I think, sir, we might be beginning to make some headway.' Detective Inspector Sloan had sought out Superintendent Leeyes at the earliest possible moment to make his report.

‘At long last, Sloan,' said Superintendent Leeyes, never one to award verbal rosettes for anything less than conviction and sentence – and preferably a long sentence at that – in the Crown Court.

‘That is, sir, we may just be getting near enough to the truth to be frightening someone.'

‘Good, good,' said the superintendent heartily. ‘Fear is always a factor in murder, Sloan. And it can be a factor for good, too, don't forget.'

‘Sir?'

‘There's healthy fear. You've only to look at the death threats you get from doctors these days.'

Sloan placed the source of this accusation quite easily: straight to the superintendent's paunch, to the size of which the police doctor had lately taken great exception.

‘You see, sir,' he said, averting his gaze from his superior officer's burgeoning girth, ‘my wife tells me we've just had another special delivery at home.'

Leeyes grunted. ‘So someone's hoping you'll settle for the ha'pence rather than the kicks?'

‘For a bit more than ha'pence,' said Sloan feelingly.

‘What is it this time? More roses?'

‘Tickets for two on a special luxury tour of the great gardens of Europe, no extras.'

‘They know your weak spots, don't they?' growled Leeyes.

‘It's the trip we always planned to take when I retired,' he said with dignity.

‘So someone's done their homework, Sloan.'

‘Paid for in cash at the travel company's head office,' he said, ‘for a Mr and Mrs C. D. Sloan of Berebury.'

‘Hitting where it hurts,' mused Leeyes. He lifted a bushy eyebrow at an angle that Wayne Goddard would have envied.

‘It's seeing the gardens I – we – would have been going for,' insisted Sloan. ‘Not the luxury.'

‘Quite right,' said Leeyes, adding obscurely, ‘The nuts come when the teeth have gone.'