Past Tense (22 page)

‘Don't give them to him,' ordered Sloan. ‘Stall.' He replaced the telephone and turned to Crosby. ‘Simon Puckle shouldn't find that too difficult. Solicitors do it all the time.'

‘Surely if Joe Short was the one who broke into the nursing home he could have taken away any picture he wanted so those can't matter all that much,' reasoned Crosby.

‘That's true,' admitted Sloan. ‘But we can't afford to leave any stone unturned.' That might not have been the equivalent of thinking off-piste but it was what he had been taught.

‘More tea, sir?'

‘Certainly not. Let's go.'

‘Damory Regis?' suggested Crosby hopefully.

‘Puckle, Puckle & Nunnery,' countered Sloan.

 

Miss Florence Fennel handed over a packet of old photographs without hesitation. ‘Would one of our interview rooms be a help, Inspector?'

Seated and gloved, Detective Inspector Sloan went through a little pile of photographs one by one for the second time. He put aside the up-to-date one of Joseph Short and then turned his attention to the others. They were black and white and obviously older and much handled. Some even had the deckled edge of an earlier photographic era. They included several of a young couple outside a little house labelled on the back ‘Us at Number 29'. Then one of the same young couple with a small baby on a rug in front of them in the garden of the house, ‘Us with Joe at six months', then that baby, a small child now, standing uncertainly beside a dining room table set for a meal, his head exactly level with the tabletop. Written on the back was ‘Joe at 2 years, six months'. The rest of the pile comprised a series of pictures of foreign parts – Africa, the Middle East and presumably Lasserta.

‘We've seen them all before,' complained Crosby, looking over Sloan's shoulder.

‘They haven't changed,' said Sloan quietly, ‘but we have.'

Crosby straightened up. ‘I don't get it, sir.'

‘To put it the modern way, Crosby, our knowledge base has been increased.'

‘I still don't get it.'

‘By Tod Morton.'

‘Tod? The undertaker? What's he got to do with—?'

‘Something he told us.'

‘Not that bit about a man's height being seven times the length of his foot?'

‘You're getting warm, Crosby. Try again.'

‘A piece of string is twice as long as half its length?'

‘Not that. Got a measure on you?'

Crosby wriggled his hand through several pockets before producing one. ‘Here, sir.'

‘No, you do it.'

‘What?'

‘Measure the height of this table.'

‘This one here?'

‘Go on. They're pretty standard.'

Detective Constable Crosby pushed his chair back and measured the height of the table from the floor. ‘I've done that, sir. Now what?'

‘Double it.'

‘What, like doubling the number you first thought of?' asked the constable.

‘No…yes.' Sloan stood up. ‘Hold the measure up to twice the height of the table.'

Crosby stood up, too, and raised the measure in his hand. ‘Like this, sir.'

‘Just like that, Crosby.' Sloan stood back. ‘Would you say that Joe Short was taller than where the end of your measure is now?'

‘A lot taller. He's a big man.'

‘That's what I thought, too,' said Sloan softly.

‘Taller than you, sir, anyway.' Crosby drew himself up to his full height and said, ‘But not as tall as I am.'

‘All right, Crosby. I get the message.' There was no use telling the constable that shorter policemen reflected full employment and taller ones unemployment and thus more tall candidates to choose from. ‘You can put that measure away now, thank you.'

They were interrupted by a call on Crosby's mobile telephone. ‘For you, sir,' said Crosby, handing it over. ‘William Wakefield's getting worried about his wife. She hasn't come home yet.'

‘She's not with her friend, Dawn, Inspector,' said Wakefield down the telephone, and sounding quite agitated. ‘I've just checked and Dawn hasn't heard from her at all today.'

‘What about her mobile phone?'

‘Not switched on and she hasn't responded to my voicemail message to ring me back.'

‘Have another look around for any written message she might have left you saying where she might have gone,' ordered Sloan.

‘There's nothing here, Inspector, I'm sure,' said Wakefield. ‘She must have gone out earlier thinking she'd be back before I got home.'

‘Keep looking,' said Sloan. He was beginning to agree with William Wakefield that his wife might very well have expected to be back before her husband returned from Head Office. ‘And we'll keep in touch.'

‘I know she had something on her mind,' went on William Wakefield, ‘because she slept so badly last night. She was worried, I could tell, but she couldn't remember exactly what about – just that something didn't quite add up – and anyway I had an early train to catch.'

Detective Inspector Sloan had never been a believer in false reassurance and he didn't offer any now. Instead he told Crosby to get an unmarked car ready and put out a general call for Joseph Short's hire car.

 

‘Quietly does it, Crosby,' said Sloan not very long afterwards. ‘No blues and twos. I may be wrong but the grave at Damory Regis is the only place that I can think of that Janet Wakefield would willingly have agreed to go to at short notice with Joseph Short. She'd have been suspicious of any other destination being mentioned but visiting the graveyard there would be logical enough after they'd heard what had happened to the coffin. They'd naturally both want to take a look at the ground again – and Short would have the excuse that he's going back home soon.'

‘He only thinks he's going back, sir.' Crosby dropped the car to the speed he considered proper for the reeling, rolling roads of rural England. The poet might have loved them but he didn't. ‘He isn't.'

Detective Inspector Sloan spotted the couple walking away from Josephine Short's grave as the police car slid to a quiet stop alongside the churchyard wall at Damory Regis. As the two policemen advanced towards them over the uneven ground the pair paused just short of the war memorial and awaited their approach. A name on the memorial caught Sloan's eye as he stepped past it: Arden, GP. He'd seen it before but it hadn't made sense then. It did now.

Janet Wakefield was the first to speak. ‘Oh, Inspector, there's nothing wrong, is there? Joe saw you talking on television about the grave and he's just brought me over here for a last look at it before he went back to Lasserta. Isn't it all a mess now?'

Joe Short nodded composedly. ‘I could have wished that there hadn't been those tarpaulins everywhere, that's all, Inspector. I'd have liked to take a better memory back overseas and all that.'

‘It's not quite all,' said Detective Inspector Sloan at his most professional. ‘Joseph Short, I am arresting you for the murder of Lucy Eileen Lansdown. You don't have to—'

The man, still quite composed, interrupted Sloan with a smile. ‘You haven't turned over two pages or something, have you, Inspector?'

The memory that was to stay with the police inspector, though, was quite a different one. It was of blood draining rapidly from the face of Janet Wakefield. She pointed a finger at Joe Short and said in a trembling voice, ‘You told me you knew that poor dead girl was called Lucy, although nobody else did, because the dim constable had let it out by accident.'

‘I never,' began a highly indignant Crosby.

Janet Wakefield started to cry. ‘And I believed you!' she quavered, now shaking an unsteady fist in Joe Short's direction. ‘You…you…you're so plausible, you…that's what you are…just horribly plausible.' Her eyes widened as the realisation dawned on her. ‘You killed that poor girl, didn't you?' She didn't stop talking even as Detective Constable Crosby slipped a pair of handcuffs over Joseph Short's wrists. She went on in an ever-rising crescendo ‘You knew all along that she was called Lucy, so don't you try to tell me that you didn't.'

 

‘Janet Wakefield might have gone on a bit, sir, but Short didn't say a thing. He kept his nerve up all along,' reported Sloan to Superintendent Leeyes later. ‘Very cool, calm and collected, he was. And charming with it, still, even with the cuffs on. Kept smiling and insisted that there must be some mistake somewhere.'

Leeyes didn't go for charm. ‘What I don't get, Sloan, is why he came back to England in the first place. Couldn't he have stayed over in Lasserta and done everything – claimed the inheritance and all that – by post?'

‘He didn't know what was still here in the way of incriminating evidence and couldn't be sure without checking,' explained Sloan. ‘And he needed to put his photograph into his grandmother's room and take away any of the real Joseph Short that there were as well as see what was in Lucy Lansdown's house. She'd been very friendly with the real Joe Short – they had first met at the hospital when his grandmother was in there – until the engagement was broken off, you know.'

‘By Brian Brenton?' The telephone wires between Lasserta and Calleshire had been very busy. Brian Brenton was the name of the employee of United Mellemetics who was said to have gone missing, just as the man calling himself Joseph Short had reported for his new job at Cartwright's Consolidated Carbons in his stead.

‘Yes, sir. Brian Brenton couldn't risk keeping up the link with Lucy Lansdown after he'd killed the real Joe Short so he broke off the connection. That's what brought about the end of her love affair and made her so unhappy.'

‘That's definite, is it?' asked Leeyes. ‘That Brenton'd killed Joseph Short, I mean?'

‘The two men had worked together at United Mellemetics and Brenton had picked up a lot of the history of the Short family there from Joe. Certainly enough to get by, anyway. Then, after the aircraft accident, he saw his chance. After all, he knew then that there was no one around in England any more after that to contradict what he had learnt. Don't forget that the Short boy had been educated all over the place – not in England at all – and so there wasn't anyone around here likely to remember him well. Brenton'd altered the photograph in Short's passport…well, fudged it a bit, anyway. That's not too difficult and most people don't look at passport photographs too closely.'

‘Passport photographs don't tell you a lot,' pronounced Leeyes sagely, ‘but I suppose it was better lost.'

‘Not for that reason, sir,' said Sloan, sticking to his narrative. ‘He lost the passport because it had Joseph Short's height in it. Brian Brenton is much taller.'

‘So that's what all that business with the table was about, Sloan.'

‘Yes, sir. That was the proof positive. The clincher, you might say. That's why he had to lose the passport – after Simon Puckle had seen it but before anyone cottoned on to the height difference.'

‘Go on.'

‘Joe Short had applied to Cartwright's after he lost his parents and got the job there. Brenton killed him when they went on a trek in the jungle the weekend Short was supposed to leave United Mellemetics and go to Cartwright's. The body's never been found, and according to the ambassador there, isn't likely to be, the jungle being what it is. Then all Brenton had to do was turn up at Cartwright's as Joe Short. It's a big island, you know, and the two places are a long way apart and in a slightly different way of business.'

In the maelstrom of investigations, Sloan had found an atlas and turned up the island of Lasserta.

‘Then,' he carried on, ‘when Brian Brenton didn't turn up for work at United Mellemetics as usual and the false Joe Short turned up at Cartwright's Consolidated Carbons as planned, everyone out there thought it was Brenton who had gone missing.'

‘Malice much aforethought,' observed the superintendent judicially.

‘Very well planned indeed by a very cool customer,' agreed Sloan. ‘All he had to do was wait until the old lady died and then come back and claim the inheritance. A big one, mind you, that he must have known all about. Don't forget that she was blind and deaf by then and wasn't alive anyway when he did turn up.'

‘There being nobody still around here in Calleshire to say he wasn't the real McCoy,' Leeyes played with a pencil, ‘since nearly all Josephine's family had fallen out with her in the past and weren't in touch now anyway.'

‘Nobody around except Lucy Lansdown, that is. Don't forget, sir, as far as she was concerned the Brian Brenton whom she saw at the funeral could have been any member of the family. She didn't know – had no reason to know – that he was there masquerading as Joe Short. He came in late, remember, and she didn't go to the wake. All she was supposed to think was that Joe Short hadn't come back from Lasserta for it, which wouldn't have been unreasonable considering the distance.'

‘And he finds out where she was living these days from those little cards the undertaker gave Janet Wakefield?'

‘Yes, sir. He might have known it already but Lucy Lansdown had moved from Calleford so he mightn't have done.' He coughed. ‘I'm afraid Mrs Wakefield feels very guilty about passing them on as she did. Naturally he would have destroyed that one straightaway.'

‘I think she should feel very lucky that Brenton didn't kill her as well,' said the superintendent robustly. ‘You got there just in time, Sloan.'

A noticeably shaken Janet Wakefield had explained to Sloan that she had been about to ring the police and tell them that she had noticed the slip the so-called Joe Short had made by mentioning Lucy Lansdown's name when no one was supposed to know this. Then, before she could do anything about it, the man himself – as amiable and plausible as ever – had turned up on her doorstep suggesting a farewell visit to the grave on his part.