Little Knell (2 page)

‘I should imagine that Mr Fixby-Smith is here, like Mr Puckle, in his professional capacity,' said Sid, deciding against trying to explain to Wayne that it wasn't the custom of Wetherspoon and Wetherspoon to help themselves to the goods they were removing – good or bad.

‘Big deal,' said Wayne Goddard laconically.

‘In which capacity,' said Sid Wetherspoon, bending once more to the sandalwood ottoman, ‘he has inherited this pretty little lot here. It's all going to the museum seeing as how it's of anthropological interest.'

‘All of it?'

‘So Mr Puckle says. And he should know because he's paying us. Puckle, Puckle and Nunnery are the colonel's executors.'

‘Even that spear on the wall?'

‘Assegai,' said the removal man knowledgeably. ‘Used to see quite a lot of them about in the old days. Colonials coming home.'

‘Offensive weapon within the meaning of the Act is what the magistrates would call that,' said Wayne Goddard, equably knowledgeable, but in a rather different field. ‘A bladed instrument.'

‘I don't care what they would call it,' said Wetherspoon flatly. ‘If Puckle, Puckle and Nunnery are paying us to take it over to the museum, then that's where it goes – all of it. And nowhere else. Understood?'

‘Understood.'

‘Including that rather valuable brass tray over there that has come to Calleshire from Birmingham by way of Benares.'

‘But who gets the money?' persisted Wayne.

‘That I don't rightly know.' Sid's lips came together in a tight clamp. ‘That's family business. Now, get going or we'll never get shot of this job.'

‘But, Sid…'

‘Mr Wetherspoon to you,' said Sid sternly. ‘Unless, that is,' he added from long experience in the removals business, ‘you were ever to drop anything on my foot and then you could call me whatever you like because you wouldn't be around long enough for me to hear you. Understood?'

‘Yes, Si—Mr Wetherspoon.'

‘And mind that Ali Baba vase as you go. We should have moved it out of the way before we started on this chest. They can come valuable, too.' He looked disparagingly down at the youth. ‘I dare say you know all about Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, don't you?'

Wayne Goddard grinned for the first time that day. ‘Yes, Mr Wetherspoon.'

‘I thought you might. Now, take your end gently round the doorway and then we'll have another rest. It's heavy enough.'

‘Yes, Mr Wetherspoon.'

They were interrupted by a pleasant voice from the other end of the room. ‘I say, Sid, can you spare a minute?'

‘Coming, Mr Puckle.' Sid immediately lowered the ottoman again, this time answering to his Christian name without hesitation. Puckle, Puckle and Nunnery put a lot of good business in the way of Wetherspoon and Wetherspoon; far too much for Sid to be standing on ceremony with the solicitor.

‘Mr Fixby-Smith here tells me that there's something at Whimbrel House that needs rather specialized lifting.' Simon Puckle was standing beside the museum curator. They were both staring down at something on the floor, and if the solicitor recognized Wayne Goddard, he gave no sign of it. ‘It's just here.'

Sid dusted off his hands and walked over to the two men with a certain amount of curiosity. He'd seen nothing in his preliminary look round the house that had struck him as a particular problem. ‘What's that, then? Something extra?'

‘Rodoheptah,' said Marcus Fixby-Smith.

‘Come again?' said Sid.

‘This sarcophagus here,' explained the museum curator, indicating a long wooden oblong object at his feet.

‘Ah, so that's what that is, is it?' said Sid easily. ‘I hadn't reckoned on that being too difficult to lift myself. It doesn't look it.'

‘Not difficult,' amplified Marcus Fixby-Smith. ‘Important. Mr Howard Air – he's my committee chairman – is very pleased we've come into all this…'

‘Ah.' Sid let out a long breath. ‘That explains it.' In their time Wetherspoon and Wetherspoon had effortlessly moved countless objects deemed by their owners to be important as well as difficult to lift. He regarded the painted wooden object with professional interest. The colours had faded to the palest of pinks and greys. ‘Valuable, is it?'

‘Very,' said Fixby-Smith shortly. ‘To us, anyway. It's an Egyptian mummy and it should put the Greatorex Museum on the map at long last.'

‘You mean,' said Wayne Goddard, finding something in his day's work of interest at long last, ‘that there's a body in there?'

‘Probably,' said the museum curator, quite unconcerned, ‘but we won't be able to be absolutely sure the grave robbers haven't been into it first until it's been X-rayed and we've seen the bones.'

Simon Puckle said by way of explanation, ‘Colonel Caversham brought it back from one of his first journeys of exploration in the Middle East…'

‘Exact provenance unknown, though,' put in Marcus Fixby-Smith, quoting from a long list in his hand.

‘… where,' continued the solicitor, ‘it was not unknown for English travellers to be sold empty sarcophagi.'

‘I'll bet,' said Wayne Goddard in spite of himself.

Simon Puckle gave a deprecating cough. ‘It must also be said that it was equally the case in those days that on occasion…' He paused and amended this. ‘… quite often, returning English travellers chose to declare the sarcophagus they were shipping home to be – er – unoccupied to facilitate their getting it through customs.'

‘Can't trust anyone, can you?' marvelled Wayne Goddard.

‘I see on the executors' schedule here,' the museum curator waved his list in the air in the direction of Simon Puckle, ‘that it has been described as “one sarcophagus, exact contents unknown”.'

‘Precisely,' responded the solicitor. ‘We, although we are acting for the Colonel's estate, don't really know what's in there. That is, we are not in a position to say with any degree of certainty.'

‘However,' announced Marcus Fixby-Smith firmly, ‘for the purposes of removing this artefact from here to the Greatorex Museum I am deeming it to contain the remains of a human being rightly or wrongly given the name of Rodoheptah, since this is what the colonel called it.'

‘Quite so,' murmured Simon Puckle.

‘What does that mean exactly?' asked Sid, wiping his hands on his trousers, the better to take hold of the wooden case.

‘That we carry it very carefully,' said Fixby-Smith. He was a man to whom the use of the Royal we came easily.

‘Like we knew there was someone in there?' asked Wayne. He looked distinctly dubious.

‘Just like that,' said Fixby-Smith. ‘A someone moreover who might come to harm if he were tipped up.'

‘Or even tilted,' growled Sid Wetherspoon, who had a good idea of what the firm's insurers would have to say about any claim arising for damages to the skeleton of a long-dead Egyptian.

‘How do you know it's a he?' asked Wayne. He had already sensed that his employment with the removal firm wasn't going to last any longer than it had done with all the other jobs he had tried. ‘Could have been a woman, couldn't it?'

‘Not with that name ending,' replied Fixby-Smith absently.

‘Use your eyes, lad.' Sid pointed to a phallic design still just discernible on the mummy case.

‘What? Oh, I see…' At the drop of a hat Wayne's face assumed a look of unbelievable innocence. ‘Blue for a boy…'

‘That's enough of that, Goddard,' snapped Sid Wetherspoon. ‘Here, take your end and get moving.'

Wayne Goddard grinned cheekily as he bent down. ‘What you might call dead weight, eh?'

Wetherspoon, ignoring this, turned to Simon Puckle and Marcus Fixby-Smith and said with dignity, ‘I can assure you, gentlemen, that moving the mummy will be no problem at all.'

Moving the mummy was a problem somewhere else, though.

The police station at Berebury.

But later.

Chapter Two

Bumped

‘Detective Inspector Sloan?' enquired the man's voice at the other end of the telephone. ‘Jenkins here. Customs and Excise, Kinnisport.'

‘Good morning,' said Sloan warily. The police force were not the only regulatory body in the kingdom deeply concerned with the pursuit of wrongdoers. Customs and Excise ranked high among the others.

And knew it.

‘Just a courtesy call…'

‘Ah…' Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan was head of the tiny Criminal Investigation Department of F Division of the Calleshire Constabulary, and such troubles as there were in the market town of Berebury and its rural environs usually landed on his desk; but not those offshore. They were the province of the water guard.

The exciseman gave a little laugh. ‘From one brother-in-law to another, you might say.'

‘Quite,' responded Sloan, acknowledging the witticism. The poet Robert Burns had been an exciseman; perhaps Jenkins too saw himself as having a way with words.

‘Or to fellow labourers in the vineyard.'

Actually, this was generous of Jenkins since Customs and Excise enjoyed powers of search – let alone other things – envied by both the police and the Inland Revenue.

‘About a man called Boller at Edsway. Horace Boller,' said Jenkins. ‘Do you people know him?'

‘The boatman? Oh, yes, we know Boller all right.' The Boller family had been twisting the people of Edsway since time immemorial. ‘An old rogue if ever there was one; always in a very small way, though. Never does anything you can actually pin on him.'

‘That's the man,' said Jenkins at once.

‘What's he done now?' If the excise people had caught out Horace Boller in malfeasance then they were better men than the entire Calleshire Constabulary who had signally failed to catch out Boller performing any action that constituted a chargeable offence. And not for want of trying, either.

‘We're not sure that he's done anything,' said the man from Customs and Excise frankly. ‘Well, that is to say nothing that we can nail him for.'

‘So?'

‘I don't know what it was like with you inland, Inspector, but it was pretty foggy out at sea this morning…'

‘A little misty here, that's all,' said Sloan, waiting.

‘Boller was attending to his lobster pots off the headland early today when he fished something up in one of them.'

‘Something interesting swam into it while he wasn't looking, then?' Sloan tried to hurry the man along. Customs and Excise were very much the longest-established service, and now and then inclined to rub it in.

‘Something valuable, Inspector,' said Jenkins. ‘Something very valuable indeed. And not a lobster.'

‘Drugs?' said Sloan, beginning to get irritated with the other man's circumlocution.

‘Four kilos of just that,' said Jenkins with satisfaction. ‘It's gone for analysis, of course, but we're sure enough it's heroin.'

‘I see,' said Sloan. He wasn't surprised by the information. They'd worked out long ago that the drugs that percolated out all over the county of Calleshire were coming in by sea. ‘And Boller handed it in just like that?' Now that was something that did surprise him.

‘Boller told us that he didn't know what it was or how it came to be in one of his lobster pots.'

‘And did he know?'

‘Ah, Inspector, that's a horse of a very different colour. You see, there just happened to be one of our own vessels about at the time, and it hove in view out of the fog just as Boller was hauling his catch in. He hadn't known we were lying off the headland and, because of the poor visibility, we hadn't realized how near he was to us.'

‘And so Boller turned Queen's Evidence pretty quickly, just to be on the safe side?' He'd never known any man so good at minding his own back as Horace Boller.

Jenkins laughed again. ‘I reckon he didn't have much choice about doing his Little Jack Horner act because he saw us see him at it.'

‘“What a good boy am I”,' quoted Sloan absently, thinking hard.

‘He pulled out a plum, all right,' said Jenkins. ‘The street value of this little lot doesn't bear thinking about; although how the dealers use the money they make from the stuff without it showing beats me.'

‘Us, too. All the businesses we know here are doing well but not so well as we'd want to know the reason why.'

‘Somebody's getting the money,' said the Customs and Excise man ineluctably.

‘Undoubtedly, but you tell me who and we'll run them in. No problem.'

‘And getting rid of the takings pretty quickly too – well before we catch 'em with it, anyway.'

‘And, as far as we know,' persisted Sloan, undeflected, ‘all the local solicitors and accountants are as upright as pianos.'

‘And the insurance people?'

‘How can anyone tell?'

‘It must be big money. Really big.'

‘I don't doubt it,' the policeman said.

Detective Inspector Sloan had decided years ago that all policemen had to live strictly compartmentalized lives. At his own breakfast table only this morning there had been a lengthy debate – well, discussion, anyway – on whether or not the Sloan household's budget would run to the purchase of a special collection of patio standard roses. His wife, Margaret, had been markedly unsympathetic.

It wasn't so much a matter of guns before butter, she had remarked, as butter before roses. Hanging heavily over the talk had been the unresolved matter of a new floor covering to replace the worn one in the Sloan kitchen.

And now here he was at work, having taken a quantum leap in relative values, talking not only about drugs worth a king's ransom on the open market but the manifold difficulties of stashing the proceeds away. He said more to himself than to the customs man, ‘It's a funny old world, all right.'