Passing Strange (15 page)

Stolen the lead from the church roof.

What, him steal the lead from the church roof? (Pause for rich chuckle). He couldn't nick a lead soldier from the playgroup.

Bill Sikes, provoked: Yes, I could.

First policeman: Get away with you, Sikes. You're too old for all that ladder work.

Bill Sikes, insistent: No, I'm not. It wasn't difficult.

Detective-Inspector Sloan did not lend himself to that sort of performance very often.

And it wouldn't do for Richenda Mellows.

It wouldn't do for a murder enquiry either. Never for one moment had Sloan forgotten the object of the exercise. The memory of Joyce Cooper mustn't get submerged in a welter of interviews and statements. There was a certain decorum called for in dealing with the Last Enemy.

Sloan therefore kept his approaches to Richenda Mellows deliberately low-key. And even while he was talking to the figure in blue jeans and woolly jacket he was aware of a quality of strange detachment about the girl's unresponsiveness that did not accord with the interview room. She was utterly calm and relaxed. He wasn't at all sure that she was even listening to him. In some mysterious way she seemed to have withdrawn inside herself.

“You're quite sure you've nothing to say, miss?” he asked for the umpteenth time. Sloan felt a momentary flash of curiosity about the primitive tribe of people among whom she had grown up. If they, too, had this serenity then he could see why Richard Charles Mellows, anthropologist, had gone to live with them. There were, Sloan was willing to be the first to admit, more things in Heaven and earth than were dreamed of in Horatio's philosophy.

And not all of them in Denmark either.

For the umpteenth time she made no reply. Richenda Mellows stayed quite unassailable in her turret of silence.

Already someone would be checking on the address she had given the car hire company in London. Crosby had arranged for it to be done. But Sloan did not mention that. Instead he asked her if anyone needed to know where she was tonight.

And when she didn't even answer that he said provocatively, “So you're a free agent, are you?”

Even that remark, said in the drear surroundings of the police station interview room, where she was patently anything but a free agent, failed to draw her.

She stayed silent and immutable.

Sloan looked at his watch and got up to go. She followed his actions with her eyes. He would have needed to have been a social anthropologist himself – or perhaps a behavioural scientist – to explain why it was that he still felt impelled to take proper leave of her in spite of her mutism.

“Good night, Miss Mellows,” he heard himself saying with quaint formality.

Her lips twitched.

“Good night, Inspector,” she said unexpectedly.

Out of the corner of his eye Sloan saw Crosby writing that down. He didn't know if that came from his police training or from reading
Alice in Wonderland
at a formative age.

Detective-Inspector Sloan's instructions to the Station staff on his way out were quite unequivocable.

“See that she gets everything the book says she can have,” he said gruffly. “And a good night's rest. I don't want a single thing that Defence Counsel can get his teeth into. Not a toehold. That clearly understood?”

“Anatomy coming to the aid of detection, eh, Sloan?” The voice of Dr Dabbe boomed cheerfully down the telephone the next morning. “Science coming into its own at last?”

“That's what I'm asking you, Doctor,” said Sloan steadily. “Can you help us?”

He did not like to enquire how the Consultant Pathologist to the Berebury District General Hospital usually spent his Sunday mornings. Sloan had rung him at his home fairly early in the day. The doctor's attitude over the telephone demonstrated his usual lively interest in a case but gave nothing away. He could still have been in bed with his wife. She had answered the telephone first.

“What we'd really like to know,” said Sloan, immediately getting down to essentials, “is what sort of thing the mid-wife might have known that no one else did.”

“Where the baby's dimple was,” said Dr Dabbe promptly.

“I don't think,” responded Sloan austerely, “that that knowledge would be material in the case of an eighteen-year-old girl.”

“Naevi, then,” said the pathologist, no whit put out.

“Beg pardon, Doctor?” That was the trouble with the medical profession. They could always have the last word. One that you couldn't understand. And they knew it.

“Birthmarks, Sloan.”

“Yes,” said Sloan. “We'd thought of them. That's the obvious thing, isn't it?”

“Or no birthmarks,” Dr Dabbe said.

“If she had one and the midwife knew the Mellows baby hadn't,” spelled out Sloan.

“Or the other way round,” pointed out Dabbe helpfully.

“Is there anything else?” asked Sloan. Detaining someone for questioning did not usually include going over them for birthmarks.

The pathologist thought for a moment. “Teeth wouldn't be any help with an infant.”

“Dental decay is unknown in the tribes of the region,” Sloan informed him sourly. He was old enough to have gone to a dentist when it hurt. “If you ask me, Richenda Mellows hasn't a filling in her head.”

“They do sound a backward lot out there, don't they?” said Dabbe breezily. “I don't suppose they've got a lot of use for doctors either. And before you say you haven't too, Sloan, had you thought about age?”

“Age?”

The pathologist said, “You can't deceive an experienced medical practitioner about age. She would have to be the right age to get away with anything.”

“And eyes?”

“Almost everything about a woman's appearance can be changed by art or science,” pronounced Dabbe, “except the colour of her eyes.”

Sloan decided that Mrs Dabbe was definitely not in the room. “Of course, Doctor, we don't know yet if the question of the Mellows inheritance has anything at all to do with the murder of Joyce Cooper.”

The pathologist said, “It's early days yet, Sloan.”

“We've been over her cottage,” said Sloan.

Early that morning he and Crosby had examined the murder victim's house from top to bottom. There had been nothing to help them there. If Joyce Cooper had a private life it had left few traces in her home. The dwelling was cared for – but only up to a point. The point came when work took over.

There had been a little framed text, neatly worked in cross-stitch hanging near the telephone. It ran

The trivial round, the common task, Will furnish all we ought to ask.

Some philosophers spelled things out more elaborately, but as religious rules went it said almost everything. It certainly said a great deal about Joyce Cooper.

“Not a lot of joy in the house,” said Sloan to the pathologist.

Dr Dabbe had been continuing to think about Richenda Mellows. “In the absence of striking family likeness, Sloan …”

“Yes?”

“You might – theoretically at least …”

“Yes?”

“Have to exclude a touch of the Old Pretender's.”

“The what?”

“Said by some to have been smuggled in to the royal accouchement …”

“Baby switching?” Sloan tried to visualize the list of principal arrestable offences. “We don't get a lot of that down at the Station these days.” He thought it had got left behind in Victorian melodrama.

“In a warming-pan,” said Dabbe negligently.

Warming-pans, too, had gone out.

The pathologist changed his tune. “Actually, Sloan, any congenital deformity could be relevant. And,” he added soberly, “then, of course, the testimony of the midwife would have been decisive.”

Sloan matched his seriousness. “That's what I was afraid of, Doctor.”

Mr Stephen Terlingham made no bones at all about seeing Detective-Inspector Sloan and Detective-Constable Crosby on a Sunday morning. The offices of Messrs Terlingham, Terlingham and Owlet were in Bishop's Yard at Calleford. So was Mr Terlingham's house. He lived over the offices in a Georgian house whose perfection of style was a perpetual temptation to those who came to photograph the Minster. If they stood carefully they could get in something of the house and all of the Minster, which put both into photographic perspective, so to speak. The Bishop's Palace which lay behind and belonged to a later – less happy – architectural period was usually mistaken for offices and seldom photographed.

This morning there were few tourists about. Those folk who were hurrying across Bishop's Yard to the Minster were on their way to Morning Service. The Great Bell of Calleford encouraged them with a clangour that in any other sound-form would have constituted Environmental Pollution within the meaning of the Act. If his formal garb was anything to go by, Mr Stephen Terlingham had also been intending to attend it. There was nothing at all casual about his Sunday attire. He was a lean man with a figure that did his suit credit. Black suited him too.

He received the two policemen with the grave courtesy that had he – Stephen Terlingham – had his way would have been the hallmark of the profession. He had grave reservations about the trestle-table approach of the neighbourhood Law Centre and even graver doubts about the instant law of the radio chat show. Breeziness had no place amid the dark mahogany furniture set carefully upon the Turkey-red carpet of the senior partner's room.

There was nothing of the ambulance-chaser about Mr Stephen Terlingham.

“The Mellows family,” he said to Sloan after a due and proper exchange of credentials, “have been clients of the firm for several generations.” He added a further artistic touch of antiquity to the general impression of extreme age given off by everything in sight by saying, “My old father always said that no good would ever come of that quarrel the Brigadier and his nephew had.”

Sloan observed sententiously that good seldom came of any quarrel. He'd learned that lesson on the beat long ago.

“Of course,” said the solicitor consideringly, “the Brigadier wasn't the easiest of men to get on with. Liked his own way, you know.”

Sloan said he imagined that Brigadiers usually did.

Crosby said that Brigadiers usually got it.

“And I understand,” said Stephen Terlingham, “that young Richard Mellows had a mind of his own too.”

“Ran in the family, I expect,” said Sloan. Sloan was Calleshire-born and bred and if he remembered police gossip from long ago it was this Mr Stephen Terlingham's father who had been known as ‘young Mr Stephen'. His grandfather was ‘old Mr Stephen'. That had left no scope at all for this Mr Stephen to be called anything but ‘Mr Stephen' again – like his great-grandfather before him. The other branch of the Terlinghams had petered out in the female line before the present-day Portias had got their foot in the door of the Inns of Court. The present generation of the Owlet family was represented by a young hopeful straight from Law School presently being allowed to find his feet under the tutelage of an aged Chief Clerk.

“You could be right,” said the solicitor non-committally.

“My enquiries,” said Sloan, stating the police position, “arise out of the murder of Miss Joyce Cooper.” He could see the Minster from where he was sitting. Its very presence seemed to add weight to the lawyer's carefully delivered statements.

The solicitor acknowledged the mention of murder with a quick nod. “Edward Hebbinge telephoned me last night, Inspector. Though I was there earlier myself.”

“At the Flower Show?” Sloan hadn't known that.

“When there is anything special at the Priory, Inspector, I always make a point of attending it.” He bowed his head slightly. “Mrs Mellows expected it.”

Sloan in his turn acknowledged this with a quick nod which did not reveal whether he thought it window-dressing or not.

“A nasty business,” continued Terlingham.

“Yes, sir,” responded Sloan. “A nasty business indeed.” Two could play at the game of not making helpful comment. He explained that Richenda Mellows had been detained for questioning. He might also have added that she had partaken of a good breakfast – but he didn't.

“I do not act for Miss Mellows,” said Terlingham at once. “If in fact, you happen to know of anyone who is acting for her I should be glad to get in touch with them. Very glad.”

“I very much doubt,” said Sloan, with more than a touch of dryness, “if anyone is.”

“So do I,” said the solicitor with his first touch of warmth. “In spite of several earnest attempts I was not myself able to persuade her to seek professional advice.”

Sloan was not surprised. He doubted if either the view of the Minster or the Turkey-red carpet would have cut much ice with Richenda Mellows. She was a girl on her own. With a mind of her own. Whether she was a Mellows or not.

“Her father,” said Terlingham, tightening his lips, “if he was her father, that is – seems to have brought her up on highly selective impressions of the English legal system.”

“I don't think she thinks Our Policemen Are Wonderful either,” said Sloan wryly. “Not any more.”

Terlingham shot him a look in which Sloan thought he could detect fellow-feeling. “She insists, Inspector, on dealing with everything herself.”

“Difficult,” said Sloan.

“Especially in the present circumstances.” Terlingham took off his glasses and began to polish them. “I am in the process of discharging the duties of executor of the estate of the late Mrs Agatha Mellows …”

“Yes?” said Sloan encouragingly.

“And trustee of the Marriage Settlement of the late Brigadier Richard Mellows.”

“I see,” said Sloan comfortably. “Then you know all about the family and you can put us in the picture, can't you?”

“Well, I … hrmph … hrmph … I don't know about that.”