Past Tense (17 page)

‘They don't know about that.'

The man laughed outright. ‘Don't you believe it, Inspector. Someone's seen them there and told the paper about it. And I've already been asked what they're looking for there.'

‘Do I have to tell them?'

‘They'll find out very quickly if you don't. Think ferrets – a sackful of the blighters – and you've got a press pack. So what's to do with the frogmen?'

‘The girl's handbag. That's what we're looking for.'

‘I can't see any harm in telling them so, then. After all,' said the man cunningly, ‘it might lead you to it.'

‘That would only be if it's not in the river.'

‘Precisely. Now what about the break-in at the nursing home?'

‘They might not have connected the two.'

The man gave a cynical laugh. ‘Perhaps not, since I understand actually we haven't either, but it won't stop them asking you about it.'

Sloan wasn't sure whether to take the Press Relations Department man up on his use of the word ‘we' or not but then decided it was an expression of professional solidarity and stayed silent.

‘They'll say anything, Inspector, to bounce an unwary answer out of you.' He went on earnestly, ‘They'll deliberately put two and two together to make five so that you automatically tell 'em how it really was in self-defence. It's human instinct.'

Detective Inspector Sloan ground his teeth: he was, after all, supposed to be in charge of the Criminal Investigation Department. ‘How do you people get to know all these things about the case?'

The man gave a tight little smile. ‘We consider ourselves pretty well briefed. We have to be to field some of the questions that we get asked ourselves.'

‘Well, I'm not happy about saying anything more than that,' said Sloan.

The man gave a deep sigh. ‘I can well believe it but, Inspector, you should be aware that you are probably also going to be asked about some missing rings – valuable ones.'

Sloan started. ‘But the grave robbery has been kept under wraps. Tod Morton promised and I'm sure the vicar wouldn't have—'

‘Sure. But there's been nothing stopping any jeweller and pawnbroker in the town you care to mention having a friendly word with a reporter. You've circulated the details to them, remember? And those missing rings are very valuable – not paste. They'll want to know all right if there's any connection with the rings and the break-in at the Berebury Nursing Home, let alone what's going on at Damory Regis.'

‘How did they know about the break-in anyway?' Sloan challenged immediately.

‘No reason to keep it secret. That information will have been put out in a routine way. There's probably a paragraph about it already set up for tomorrow's paper.' He shrugged his shoulders. ‘What goes on in nursing homes is always news, too, you know.'

‘I wouldn't want the information about the grave robbery in the public domain yet,' said Sloan, suddenly serious. ‘It won't help our enquiries.'

The man gave him a pitying look. ‘If, Inspector, you imagine that the sight of white-coated police specialists working in the graveyard there hasn't alerted someone in Damory Regis to the fact that something interesting is going on behind those screens and in the tent they put up there, then I'm afraid you're living on another planet.'

It was therefore a considerably chastened detective inspector who submitted to an instant seminar on handling the press. His ultimate humiliation came as it was coming to an end when a minion entered the room with a message for him.

‘Sorry interrupting, Inspector, but it's a message from your wife.'

‘My wife?' he said, alarmed. Margaret Sloan never rang the police station save in dire emergency. ‘What—?'

‘She wants to know if you've got a clean shirt on for the press interview. She's heard it's going to be on local television.'

‘Ah, Miss Fennel, come in.' Simon Puckle sat back in his chair and looked hopefully at his secretary. ‘How have you been getting on?'

‘Quite well, really, Mr Puckle, all things considered.' She placed an orderly pile of papers down in front of him. ‘I have been able to check all the relevant birth, marriage and death certificates – the registrar was most helpful.'

‘Good going.'

‘And,' Florence Fennel had never been one to need praise and so carried straight on, ‘I have established that the late Josephine Eleanor Short was the daughter of a very wealthy family in West Calleshire. In her day they lived in great style in a big house called Blaxlandton Hall over there. I understand that the family fortunes had been based on some invention that they had made in the Crimean War.'

‘The balaclava?'

Miss Fennel rose above frivolity. ‘Something, I understand, to do with cartridges for army rifles.'

‘Where there's muck there's money,' said the solicitor ambiguously.

‘The birth certificate of her son – that is George Peter Arden Short – doesn't show any name for the father and the place of birth is given as a home for unmarried mothers in Luston.' Florence Fennel, whose own personal life was a model of propriety, said indignantly, ‘You'd have thought a family like that could have afforded to send her somewhere better, wouldn't you?'

‘I would have thought that at that time it was more a question of morals than money,' mused Simon Puckle. ‘They must have minded a great deal. Times change, you know.'

‘They must have minded more than His Grace,' remarked Miss Fennel pertinently, the Duke of Calleshire's daughters having always been a notably lively lot. Puckle, Puckle & Nunnery had acted for the family for generations and she knew its history well.

‘The aristocracy got its mind round illegitimate babies a very long time ago,' said Simon Puckle, privy to several
sub rosa
settlements concerning these. ‘They tend to take them in their stride. The
haute bourgeoisie
have always found it more difficult. The purple of trade, as Oscar Wilde put it so well, doesn't take so well to scandal. Illegitimacy comes between them and respectability, you know. And the social climbing which seems to have been one of their chief objects in life.'

Miss Fennel was still indignant. ‘There was, after all, a war on.'

Simon glanced at the date on the copy of the birth certificate. ‘True. So this George marries in due course and has a son, Joseph. And George and his wife lose their lives in an air crash and their son inherits. That right?'

‘Yes, Mr Puckle.'

‘So where does the Kemberland Trust come in? Have you been able to get on to that yet?'

‘That proved a little bit more difficult, Mr Puckle, but I did find the case in the end. It would appear that the Kemberland Trust was set up for the benefit of the descendants of Josephine Short's great-great-grandmother on her mother's side.'

‘Not the armaments people?'

‘No. The other side of the family. They were successful manufacturers who had made a lot of money out of cotton. They would seem to have sold out when the going was good and well and truly tied the funds up for future generations.'

The solicitor nodded with professional approval, uninvested cash being the legal equivalent of the navy's loose cannon. ‘Thus creating the Kemberland Trust, I take it?'

‘That is so.' Miss Fennel consulted her notes. ‘As far as I can establish the settlement came to an end with the death of Josephine Short's grandmother. This was the point that had been determined when the trust had been established when the capital had to be distributed to all her surviving grandchildren and the trust wound up.'

Simon Puckle nodded. ‘Which is presumably when the family – or some of them, anyway—'

‘Including her own mother,' said Miss Fennel, rigid with disapproval.

‘…tried to stop Josephine getting her share.'

‘Exactly, Mr Puckle.'

‘They wouldn't have had a leg to stand on in law, of course,' said the solicitor thoughtfully. ‘The provisions of the trust would be bound to be upheld by the court provided that it had been properly set up and administered by the trustees.'

‘They had been, Mr Puckle, but it didn't stop the family trying to deprive Josephine of her rights.'

‘Not nice.'

‘Nasty,' said Miss Fennel militantly.

 

‘It's my turn,' insisted Joe Short. He was on the telephone to The Old Post Office at Staple St James. ‘After all, you fed me last time and it's only right that you should both come to the Bellingham tonight as my guests.'

‘Well,' prevaricated William Wakefield, ‘I'll have to ask Jan first. I don't know what she'd planned for this evening and we've got quite a busy time ahead of us today. I've got to get a lot done while I'm home. I'm due to go back to work quite soon.'

‘I'm not going to be here all that long either,' said Joe. ‘Now that I've got a new travel document or whatever they call it instead of my passport, I'm going to book my flight back to Lasserta for just as soon as I can get a seat. Cartwright's Carbons are benevolent enough but they're not silly.'

William Wakefield, who originally had had quite different plans for the evening, capitulated at this, and promised that they would be there at the Bellingham if Jan agreed.

Janet assented readily enough when he told her, her mind clearly elsewhere. ‘Oh, all right, then. It'll be nice not to have to cook,' she said absently. ‘Now, are you ready for the off? The receptionist said not to be late because she'd only just squeezed us in at short notice because you're at home. For once,' she added meaningfully.

‘I bet he keeps us waiting, all the same,' forecast William Wakefield. ‘He always does. Supercilious blighter. Besides,' he added half to himself, ‘he hadn't told me the half of it. Not even for ready money.'

Janet's head came up. ‘What was that, Bill?'

‘Nothing, darling,' said Bill Wakefield. ‘Just a quotation from Oscar Wilde, that's all.'

 

It was by no means the first time that Detective Constable Crosby – or, indeed, his uniformed companion – had visited the Steele household. Sometimes it had been in response to complaints about the drunken behaviour of Steele,
père
; more often than not in pursuit of his son, Matthew, for what might be said to be ‘offences, various'.

The Steeles' house lay in a dingy street behind a deserted cinema, and although it was called Shepherd's Way, it was a very long time since anyone with a crook had lived there. That it was the home of crooks, though, was not, in the opinion of Detective Constable Crosby, in doubt. Indeed, at the police station it was known as Thieves' Way.

Crosby found number 5 and knocked on the door. There was no response at first and so he knocked again. Louder, this time.

‘Shall I go round the back?' asked the uniformed police constable with him. ‘There's an alley behind the houses and he's been known to scarper that way when he hears that we're here looking for him.'

‘Hang on,' said Crosby, bending his ear to the letter box. ‘I can hear someone coming.'

There was now an audible dragging of feet along the entrance hall behind the door. This was succeeded by the sound of bolts being drawn back and the appearance of a bleary-eyed Ellen Steele. She was wrapped around in a faded dressing gown and peered sleepily out at the two policemen. As soon as she saw the detective constable she asked, alarmed, ‘What's wrong?'

‘We want a word with Matthew,' said Crosby.

She relaxed a little. ‘What's he been and gone and done now?' she asked wearily.

‘Nothing that we know about exactly,' said Crosby, deliberately imprecise. ‘We just want a word, that's all at the moment.'

‘You'll be lucky,' she said. ‘That's more than I've had with him for a couple of days.'

‘Where is he, then?'

She shook her head, her hair still tousled with sleep. ‘I don't know. He didn't tell me. Just took off and hasn't been back.'

‘When?'

She screwed up her face. ‘Must have been the day before yesterday. If you must know.'

‘Yes,' said Detective Constable Crosby flatly. ‘We must.'

‘He wasn't here when I got back from work. That's all I know. And now I'm on nights I can't tell whether he's been back here or not.'

‘Where does he usually go when he's not here?' he asked.

She gave him a bleak look. ‘Prison.'

‘And when he isn't in prison?'

‘There's a girl…'

‘Where?'

‘He's not with her, I can tell you for sure, because she's been round looking for him, too. Little trollop,' pronounced Ellen Steele without rancour.

‘Anyone else looking for him?' asked the uniformed policeman at Crosby's side.

Ellen Steele favoured him with a resigned look. ‘You name it and they've been here after him. All of 'em.'

‘Debt collectors?'

She sighed and said obliquely, ‘He likes things, does our Matthew.'

‘Drug dealers?'

She sighed again. ‘Could be.' She gave a little shiver and said awkwardly, patently searching for the right words, ‘They're not so nice.'

‘No,' concurred the detective constable. That was his view, too, and he tried to steer clear of them when they came into the ambit of the police. Not that drug dealers took much interest in the police. Or much notice of them, either. They had their own way of meting out what they perceived as justice. Swift and sure it was, and no questions asked.

Belatedly Ellen Steele offered to let the police search the house. ‘But Matthew's not here.'

Reckoning that she wouldn't have made the offer if he was, Detective Constable Crosby took his leave.

‘And,' said Ellen Steele, as the two policemen turned to go, ‘I didn't break that old vase at the home neither. Honest.'

 

‘Well?' asked Superintendent Leeyes heavily when Sloan arrived in his room. ‘How did it go?'

‘Badly,' admitted Sloan. There was no need to ask what his superior officer was talking about. The press conference.

‘How much did they know?' asked Leeyes.

‘Nearly as much as we did.'

‘Wouldn't surprise me if it wasn't a load more,' growled the superintendent.

Sloan hesitated. ‘At least they hadn't cottoned on to William Wakefield and the Erroll Gardens Hotel, which is one good thing, but someone at the Bellingham had talked to a reporter about a police constable having been sniffing around in the hotel.'

‘I don't suppose the reporters are ever out of the bar there,' said Leeyes trenchantly.

‘But the worst thing, sir, was the grave disturbance.'

‘Robbery.'

‘Robbery, then,' conceded Sloan. ‘I had to skirt around that a bit.'

‘Had they made the connection?'

‘Not any more than we have,' said Sloan frankly. ‘When they asked me about it, I just said that I understood that it was a disinterment being carried out in accordance with Home Office administrative procedures and no doubt an announcement would be made in due course and that we would be duly informed if it was for anything out of the ordinary. And so would they.'

This time Sloan wasn't criticised for sounding like a civil servant and stretching a point – or two. Instead Leeyes sniffed and said approvingly, ‘That should have kicked it into touch if anything would.'

‘Some bright spark wanted to know if the wrong body had been buried and I said not as far as I knew and that I had no reason to suppose otherwise. I bet they went straight off to Morton's after that.'

‘That reminds me, Sloan. Tod Morton's been trying to get in touch with you. He wants you to go round there soonest. Deal with him, will you?'

‘Yes, sir.' Sloan made a note before the matter got lost in the rest of a very busy day. ‘Anyway, to date they didn't seem to know why an exhumation was in the process of being done and I didn't tell them.'

‘Good,' said Leeyes absently.

‘But they did want to know why the archaeologists had been brought in.'

Leeyes sat up. ‘So do I, Sloan. Tell me…'

‘Apparently they're the experts on disturbed ground.'

Leeyes, having a deeply ingrained mistrust of all experts, snorted, ‘I don't know how that'll help.'

‘Neither do I,' said Sloan wearily.

The superintendent changed tack. ‘This William Wakefield – the man who went walkabout in the middle of the night in London the same night the girl went into the river – when are you going to question him?'

‘When we can find him,' replied Sloan swiftly. ‘He isn't around to be questioned – there's no one at his house. In the meantime the Met are checking up on whether or not he hired a car that night. We want to know the answer to that pretty quickly.' This was only partly true. He didn't suppose Crosby wanted to know the answer to that or to anything much else. ‘We checked on the grandson, Joe Short, sir, while we were about it. He was on the flight he said he was, booked into an airport hotel on arrival and hired the car he's still using first thing the morning of the funeral.'

‘Fair enough.' The superintendent scrabbled through some papers on his desk. ‘So what's happening about the dead girl, Lucy Lansdown?'

‘We're making enquiries now…'

‘Anyone standing to gain from her death?' asked Leeyes trenchantly.

‘That depends on whether it was murder or suicide and—'

‘And?' Leeyes interrupted him.

‘And if it was murder then presumably the murderer does,' responded Sloan, adding a rather belated, ‘sir.'

‘The old lady hadn't left her a load of money for nursing her or anything like that?' The superintendent leant back in his chair and pontificated in his usual authoritative manner, ‘Some patients do, you know. The ill can be dangerously vulnerable. Open to persuasion, even.'