Little Knell (8 page)

Detective Inspector Sloan sipped his mug of tea. ‘He doesn't sound to have been all that lucky to me.'

‘His wife says that his employers are going spare without him,' said Harpe. ‘He's a senior audit clerk with Pearson, Worrow and Gisby, you see…'

‘The accountants?' Sloan knew Jim Pearson for a busy man but one still with time to lend a hand with good causes.

Harpe nodded. ‘Mrs Barton says they don't know which way to turn, they're so busy. Apparently, her husband's a real workhorse and accountants need workhorses. Mind you, Seedy,' he added with unconscious brutality, ‘all we're doing is holding our horses. We've charged the guy who hit Barton with driving under the influence. Just to be going on with, mind you.'

‘You can't do a lot more with everything hanging in the balance,' agreed Sloan, aware that Harpe's difficulty was a procedural one. ‘At least your problem is still alive. Mine's too dead for my liking.'

‘Talking about holding our horses,' went on Harpe, undiverted.

‘Yes?'

‘We had trouble over at Edsway last night with real horses.' The faintest glimmer of what might have been a smile crossed his features. ‘Had to hold them ourselves.'

Sloan cocked a professional ear. ‘My sort of trouble or yours?'

‘A couple of mares got out of the animal sanctuary over there and created merry hell with motorized traffic on the road to Larking.'

‘Horses and cars don't mix,' said Sloan profoundly, echoing, had he but known it, the sentiments held by that old horse soldier, Colonel Caversham.

‘They'll have to mend their fences at the sanctuary,' growled Harpe, pushing his plate away, ‘or they'll have more trouble.'

‘Only literally,' said Sloan neatly. Alison and Jennifer Kirk had more friends and supporters in Calleshire than most people. The Sloans' own cat, Squeak, had come from the Calleshire Animal Sanctuary as a rescued kitten. Sloan pushed his chair back. ‘Well, Harry, I hope your driver survives.'

‘Talking of surviving,' riposted Harpe unkindly, ‘I'm surprised that that young driver of yours hasn't come to grief yet.'

‘Crosby?'

‘Him.'

‘Luck, I expect,' said Sloan mordantly.

‘Or the devil looking after his own,' said Inspector Harpe, still determinedly superstitious.

*   *   *

‘Fractured skull, Dr Meadows says, does he, Inspector?' Dr Dabbe shot a quizzical glance in the direction of the door leading from his office to the mortuary. ‘Well, Steve should know, shouldn't he, Ruth?'

The radiographer, who was clutching some X-ray photographs under her arm, nodded energetically. Detective Inspector Sloan was standing, his notebook at the ready, while Burns, the pathologist's perennially silent assistant, was hovering between office and mortuary in the manner of an old-fashioned butler. They were all gowned and masked, and had been offered the opportunity of opting out of being present at the postmortem in case remnants of dangerous diseases were still lurking in the mummy case. None of them had, although Detective Constable Crosby had removed himself to the furthest corner of the room.

‘And, of course,' said Dr Dabbe genially, ‘there's a very famous precedent.'

‘There is?' Detective Inspector Sloan pulled himself together and tried to take a proper interest in the past.

‘In the year 1352
BC
, give or take a year.'

‘Really, doctor?' The pathologist was as bad as Happy Harry. Sloan didn't like to say – not yet – that it was the present that was so very pressing.

‘Tutankhamun, too, so it is said, Sloan, received a fatal blow to the back of the skull…'

‘Did he, doctor?' The original occupant of the mummy case might have been Egyptian but the present one wasn't.

‘In a place on the cranium where an accident is most unlikely.'

‘We'd call that suspicious circumstances, all right,' conceded Sloan, his mind still on the here and now but keeping the police end up withal.

‘Probably while he was asleep, or at any rate lying down,' said the pathologist. ‘Upon his secure hour, as Shakespeare put it so well. I've always found the murder of Hamlet's father very interesting, Sloan. That ear poison…'

‘Some other time, doctor, please,' pleaded Sloan. ‘Some other time.'

‘Right.' He picked up a hand microphone and started dictating into it the fact that in view of the nature of the subject of the examination, all present had consented to be present and were clad in their extra-special precautions outfits.

‘Dr Meadows thought you might like some straight X-rays
in situ,
Dr Dabbe,' said Ruth, a trifle shakily. ‘And I could do some A and P ones for you now but not an encephalogram, of course.'

‘A and P?' queried Sloan quickly. He had a rooted objection to being excluded from the shorthand of other people's trades and professions. Jargon for in-groups – a badge of belonging – was what it was and he didn't like it.

‘Anterior and posterior, Inspector,' replied Ruth.

‘Full frontal,' interpreted Dr Dabbe cheerfully.

‘That's if the foil could be opened up a bit more,' the radiographer said, wincing.

‘Your pretty pictures would be very helpful,' said the pathologist gallantly. ‘We're going to need X-rays sooner or later.'

Detective Inspector Sloan hoped that the radiographer was not a militant feminist.

‘And you, Inspector,' went on Dr Dabbe courteously, ‘I take it you already have all the photographs you need of the – er –
cartonnage?
'

Sloan nodded as Burns advanced with a trolley laid out with instruments.

‘I suppose,' said Dr Dabbe in a businesslike way, ‘that you'll be wanting a time frame first, Sloan.'

What Detective Inspector Sloan wanted first was the chance to get started on the hunting of the coroner's nark, but he did not say so.

Chapter Seven

Frayed

‘I am given to understand, sir,' said Detective Constable Crosby to the young man on the doorstep, ‘that last week you reported a woman as missing from this address; that is, if you're Colin Thornhill.'

‘Jill Carter,' said the young man tightly. ‘Have you found her?'

‘Not yet,' said Crosby.

‘So why have you come round here?'

‘Just checking, sir. That's all.'

‘Not again!' protested Colin Thornhill heatedly. ‘Do you realize that you're the third policeman to want to ask me questions since Jill went missing?'

‘Am I, sir?' asked Detective Constable Crosby. He was standing on the doorstep of a big old house opposite the park in the middle of Berebury. ‘Well, I never.'

‘There was the one when I reported that Jill hadn't come home last Friday…'

‘That would be our Station Sergeant,' offered Crosby helpfully.

‘And then another policeman came round here to ask me the same questions all over again. And now you.' Colin Thornhill stood back from the threshold and said grudgingly, ‘I suppose you'd better come in then.'

He led the way up to the top flat of a house that had come down in the world. Where once a successful Victorian merchant had proclaimed his worldly achievement in architectural curlicues, now half a dozen souls made their individual homes. The apartment under the roof into which Thornhill showed the constable had clearly begun life as a set of night nurseries.

‘Jill disappeared, you see,' the man said, ‘without a word to anyone. Just didn't come home that night.'

‘There's no law against disappearing,' said Crosby.

‘I understand that.' He essayed a thin smile. ‘I've been tempted to do it myself often enough when things haven't gone well, but Jill just isn't that sort of person.'

‘If you want to drop out, then you can,' said Crosby. This was a credo oft-repeated to the families and friends of those who had done so by those who moved in police circles. The families and friends invariably remained unconvinced of this truism. ‘There's nothing to stop you or anyone else going off if you want to without saying why.'

‘Jill wasn't a drop-out,' Thornhill came back at him swiftly, exhibiting the first sign of animation that he had seen so far.

‘No?'

‘No,' he said firmly. ‘Besides, she'd just started a new job.'

The constable looked down at the report in his hand. ‘As a trainee with Pearson, Worrow and Gisby, the chartered accountants.'

He nodded. ‘It was beginning at the bottom, of course…'

Crosby nodded. So was detective constable.

‘But it was a foot on the ladder.'

So was the office of detective constable.

‘And,' he said wanly, ‘we hoped it might lead somewhere.'

‘Naturally, sir.' Where Crosby wanted his career to lead was straight to Traffic Division.

‘My own employment being in the nature of things uncertain.'

Crosby glanced down again at his notes. ‘Actor?'

‘When I get the chance, or even half a chance.'

Detective Constable Crosby, being still young himself, probably understood the scenario better than his seniors: boy meets girl who is in work when he isn't; girl meets boy in need of support and gives it. Colin Thornhill was probably a sort of caveman in reverse.

‘But Jill hasn't been back to the office either,' Thornhill was saying. ‘That's what's so very worrying.' He hesitated. ‘They weren't best pleased about that; what with her being new and them being so busy just now.'

‘Overworked, was she?'

‘No.' He shook his head with an instant understanding. ‘It wasn't like that at all, officer. Jill just isn't the sort to consider suicide. I'm sure about that. Quite sure,' he added with emphasis. ‘I can't see her having a nervous breakdown.'

‘Good,' said Detective Constable Crosby with a wholly artificial enthusiasm; it wasn't suicide that the police were worrying about. Women with skulls fractured by a heavy blow on the sinciput did not then proceed to immolate themselves in mummy cases in empty houses.

‘Oh, she was working hard enough, all right,' Thornhill went on, ‘because the firm was very short-staffed. But the actual work wasn't too much for her or anything like that. She said the more she did, the more interesting she found it.'

‘And how long ago did you last see her?'

‘I haven't set eyes on her for nearly a week now,' he said dully, lapsing back into his previous weariness of manner, ‘and neither has anyone else.'

‘And where were you when you did?' Crosby had been taught that quite a lot of police work amounted to asking questions to which he would already know the answer. The importance of the procedure lay in the way in which the answer was given the sixth or seventh time round, and in particular whether or not the response was exactly the same as it had been the first and second time the question had been put. Most experienced police officers held that way to be better than any number of lie detectors.

‘The Ornum Arms at Almstone,' said Thornhill, naturally oblivious of this train of thought. ‘It makes a nice walk. We'd just been having a drink together there after she'd finished work on Friday.'

‘And she left?'

‘And I left, not her. She stayed on at the pub. She said she'd spotted someone she knew who she wanted to talk to.'

‘A friend?'

‘She didn't say.'

‘Who was it?'

‘Search me,' said Thornhill. ‘No, hang on. I heard her call him Nigel as she went over but I didn't know him. So I made myself scarce.'

‘You did, did you?' said Crosby, projecting considerable scepticism. ‘I'd like a description of this man, please. And then?'

‘Then I went to do a bit of shopping on my way home. You see, Jill didn't like shopping.'

‘But you'd had this row…'

‘We hadn't had a row.' He flared up instantly. ‘That's not true.'

Crosby looked down at the report in his hand again. ‘Over some curtains.'

‘Who told you that?' he challenged him.

‘I couldn't say.'

‘But all Jill and I had been doing,' he said carefully as if repeating something he had said again and again, ‘was discussing what colour our new curtains should be.'

‘A row,' repeated Crosby.

‘That wasn't a row,' he said with scorn. ‘That was a normal domestic talk-through.'

‘Domestic?' The word had overtones at the police station.

‘We've been together for quite a time,' Thornhill said with seeming irrelevance.

‘Then what?' asked Crosby.

‘She just didn't come back here after that.' He leaned forward and sank his head between his hands.

‘And?' Crosby discounted the gesture. The man could be a trained tragedian.

‘When it got very late I rang the Ornum Arms. Johnny Hedger – that's the landlord – said she wasn't there but he couldn't remember when she'd left.' He pulled his lips up in the travesty of a smile. ‘I expect that's what all landlords always say to women who telephone asking for their men.'

‘Could be.'

‘Well, I can assure you that they do it when men ring up asking for their women now, too.'

‘Very possibly, sir.'

‘And then I rang the hospital in case she'd had an accident.'

Crosby glanced down at the report. ‘We checked that, too. Routine.'

Colin Thornhill pulled himself up and, giving Crosby a very direct look, said, ‘What did you come here for if you've got it all written down as you obviously have?'

Crosby shuffled his feet, his eyes cast obliquely. ‘The name of her dentist, please.'

The great importance of body language and its correct interpretation had been one of the features of the detective constable's training. He had also been taught those elements of it which can be counterfeited. Crosby was well aware, too, that the man to whom he was now talking was a professional actor and thus likely to have his facial responses under control.