Past Tense (9 page)

‘Yes?' said Sloan.

‘Today Josephine's grandson – that's a young man called Joe Short – came here with Mrs Wakefield to take some of Josephine's things away. He'd arrived from overseas for the funeral. He said the executor had told him that he could, although in the event he didn't take anything away. That's Mr Simon Puckle from the solicitors down by the bridge – he got his secretary to ring us to confirm that.'

‘Go on.' No policeman needed to be told where to find the solicitors in their manor.

‘Then you came,' finished Mrs Luxton astringently. ‘First yesterday and then again now.'

‘Someone broke the vase,' put in Crosby, ‘didn't they?'

‘That's apart from the staff, of course,' said Mrs Luxton quickly. ‘They came in, naturally, to clean the room and so forth.'

‘I'll bet the breaker and enterer came in here, too,' said Crosby rather too informally. ‘The breaker, anyway,' he added under his breath.

Detective Inspector Sloan, ignoring this clear breach of police protocol when interviewing, said instead, ‘So Josephine Short died here in this room?'

Subconsciously all eyes became centred on the empty bed, now stripped to the bare mattress.

Mrs Luxton inclined her head and said, ‘That is so. We telephoned the doctor at once, of course, and he came and left the death certificate here. That was when we got in touch with Mr Wakefield's home.'

‘Not before?' said Sloan with raised eyebrows.

‘We had been given instructions by Josephine – very specific instructions, I may say – not to do this until after her death.'

‘Got it all arranged, hadn't she?' came in Crosby chattily.

‘Josephine knew her own mind,' said Mrs Luxton repressively. Then her tone lightened a little and she sighed and said, ‘Not all of our residents do, of course, which can be even more difficult.'

‘Quite so,' said Sloan. The totally irrational were a problem to the forces of law and order, too. A fool was even more trouble than a criminal and the fact that notably unpredictable behaviour was the most difficult of all to police, whether criminal or not, Sloan had learnt early on the beat. ‘What happened to the room immediately after she died?'

‘Nothing, Inspector. Apart from the bed, of course, which you can see has been stripped.' She indicated the empty bed, which was still the cynosure of all eyes.

‘And when Mrs Wakefield came?'

‘She went through the drawers of that little chest there looking for the papers the registrar wanted. Sheila – she's my deputy – was with her while she was here and says she didn't think Mrs Wakefield took anything away except some official papers. Not that there was anything to take…'

‘I'm coming to that,' promised Sloan.

‘The young woman was in an awkward position, of course,' conceded Mrs Luxton, ‘what with not having known anything at all about Josephine herself and her husband being away.'

‘Then?'

‘Then Sheila locked the room again.'

‘But we do know someone else has been in here,' murmured Sloan. He prompted her. ‘The broken vase…'

Mrs Luxton flushed. ‘My staff are adamant that none of them broke it.'

‘But then they would say that, wouldn't they?' remarked Detective Constable Crosby to no one in particular.

Mrs Luxton stiffened. ‘Our staff policy does not encourage victimisation.'

For a fleeting moment Sloan wondered if the woman would be available to do some missionary work along these lines with Superintendent Leeyes. This happy thought passed immediately and he said instead, ‘Nevertheless you will appreciate that in the circumstances we shall have to interview them all individually again.'

Mrs Linda Luxton inclined her head in what appeared to be a gesture of gracious acquiescence.

‘All breakages to be paid for,' said Crosby cheerfully. ‘Like it says in china shops.'

‘Tell me, Mrs Luxton,' intervened Sloan quickly, ‘does the name Lucy Lansdown mean anything to you?'

There was no hesitation in the matron's response. ‘No, Inspector. Occasionally we have to employ agency staff here and I could check our records but I don't know the name myself.'

‘These agency staff,' said Sloan, struck by another thought, ‘are they sometimes moonlighting from other jobs?'

‘Quite often, I'm afraid,' sighed Mrs Luxton. ‘And that means that they're usually tired out before they get here, let alone after a night's work. It's usually nights they do.'

‘Then if you would be good enough to check…'

‘Certainly, Inspector,' said Mrs Luxton, making a move towards the door. Sloan stayed her with his next question.

‘What did the late Josephine Short die from?'

‘Heart failure,' said Mrs Luxton once more.

Before Sloan could say anything in response to this, his telephone earpiece sprang to life with a message that the pathologist was ready to begin the post-mortem on the body of the unknown female recovered from the river at Billing Bridge, and would Detective Inspector Sloan make his way to the mortuary as soon as possible as there were two people there from Berebury Hospital prepared to identify the deceased.

Detective Constable Crosby fetched up at the offices of the Calleshire River Board in Calleford without enthusiasm.

‘Police,' he announced at the desk with considerable import, usually gratified by the response that this simple statement elicited. He was destined to be disappointed today.

‘I never,' responded a young man with spiky hair and earrings, throwing up his hands in mock surrender. ‘Don't hit me. I'll go quietly.'

‘Not you, mate,' said Crosby.

‘It must be the boss you're looking for, then. Bald, fat and never lifts a finger.' He smirked at Crosby. ‘On second thoughts it can't be him. Too lazy to commit a crime. If he was a sloth he'd fall off out of his tree.'

‘I've come about the river,' said Crosby.

‘What's it gone and done, then?'

‘Carried a body downstream, that's what.'

The youth changed his manner immediately. ‘Where from?'

‘That's what I've come about. We don't know yet.'

‘Where to, then?'

‘Billing Bridge.'

‘Ah,' said the youth, suddenly wise, ‘that's where the tide turns. If it's travelling downstream and the tide's coming in when it gets there, then it tends to stop just there wherever upriver it's come from.'

‘It did,' said Crosby tersely.

‘When?'

‘Last night or early this morning. What I…we…want to know is when the tide turned.'

The youth turned to a computer, punched a few buttons, frowned prodigiously, drummed his fingers on the desk and then leant down, opened a plan chest instead and produced a tide table. ‘The tide at Billing Bridge would have turned at half five this morning. The incoming tide would have slowed anything going further down until after that. Pushed it into a backwater, more like.'

‘So when would anybody…' Crosby stopped and changed the emphasis, ‘I mean any body have gone in the river at…say…Berebury for it to get there, then?'

The youth pursed his lips. ‘Is this for the law?'

‘It sure isn't for fun, laddie,' Crosby said portentously.

‘Then I'll have to ask my boss to be certain sure…that'll get him out of his chair, all right. He won't be pleased, I can tell you.'

‘Doesn't like putting anything in writing?' deduced the constable. ‘Is that it?'

‘That's him…but if you was to ask me…'

‘I am asking you,' said Crosby flatly.

The young man reached for a calculator and put some figures in. He looked up. ‘The river runs at about five knots per hour this side of the weir at Lower Malcombe – that's if there isn't too much rain about…'

‘There wasn't,' said Crosby.

‘Even so, naturally the weir slows it up a bit…'

‘Naturally.'

‘So if you was to be talking about…say…the bridge at Berebury…'

‘Just for instance,' said Crosby cautiously.

‘Well, there aren't any other bridges between Berebury and Billing.'

‘We'd got as far as that,' said Crosby with exaggerated weariness. ‘And we do also know that there are other ways of getting into the river than from a bridge. Like a boat and the riverbank.'

The youth scribbled some more. ‘Then I'd say you're looking for sometime between half ten and elevenish. Maybe a bit earlier if there was rain upriver.'

‘And,' said the constable, ‘just supposing – only supposing, mind you – we were to want to drag the river below the bridge.'

‘Depends on the size of what you were looking for,' said the youth.

‘Something small.'

‘Then frogmen would be your best bet. Grabs don't pick up little things downstream of the piers of the bridge – they get in the way and push up the rate of flow – but if whatever it is you're looking for is there, you might find it in the dead water below the piers.'

‘Thanks, mate,' said Crosby, starting to take his leave. He got to the door before he turned and said, ‘Are you the biker here?'

‘What if I am?' The clerk bristled.

‘There's a Bandit 600 Suzuki in the car park.'

‘Well, I can tell you for starters it's not the boss's,' responded the youth vigorously. ‘He couldn't get his leg over it. Not being the weight he is.'

‘Then your road fund licence expired last month,' said Detective Constable Crosby, sweeping out, adding as he did so, ‘and we know where you live.'

 

In the view of Detective Inspector Sloan there was very little to be said in favour of the surroundings in which post-mortems were conducted. One thing, though, as far as he was concerned, was the complete absence of any attempts to ameliorate the starkness of the Berebury police mortuary. In his view, any such attempts would, if possible, have made the ambience even less attractive. Crematoria might enjoy polished walnut fittings and flowers galore, and green-lawned cemeteries might lie beyond stately wrought-iron gates, but Dr Hector Smithson Dabbe's place of work boasted none of these.

The little door at the back of an anonymous, nondescript brick building, which could only be reached down a blind alley, boasted neither number nor nameplate. It wasn't, either, somewhere where even the most mischievous child could play ‘Knock-down Ginger' with a doorknocker and run away. Entry was by a door without a handle on the outside – and ingress could only be gained after a verbal exchange through a microphone set discreetly to one side of it.

Crosby had conducted this with an unseen guardian of official privacy and soon the two policemen had been admitted to the pathologist's sanctum.

‘Ah, there you are, Sloan,' said Dr Dabbe. ‘You got through the postern gate, all right, then?'

‘Yes, thank you, Doctor, whatever that might be,' said Sloan, mystified.

‘Meant to be wide enough for men but not horses, postern gates. Now, come along in. The parish bearers are ready and waiting to produce the subject.' He gave a wolfish grin. ‘That's what they used to call 'em in the olden days, anyone who was supposed to give a hand taking the body to the coroner. Now it's something much more highfaluting.'

‘Always is,' said the detective inspector.

‘Didn't have superintendents in those days either, did they?' said Dabbe solemnly, tongue in cheek.

‘Nor pathologists,' said Sloan agreeably.

‘What, no slicers and dicers?' said Crosby in an undertone.

‘All they did have, gentlemen, were those old women called the searchers who sat by the dying and then said what it was that they had died from,' said the pathologist, adding piously, ‘I hope I can do better.'

‘So do I,' said Sloan, policeman on duty, first and last. ‘I understand that someone from the hospital where the deceased worked is here and prepared to confirm any provisional identification.'

‘She's in the waiting room now with her friend, the thoroughly modern Milly.'

Sloan looked blank.

The pathologist waved them away without explanation. ‘My man Burns will take you along there.'

The two policemen followed the pathologist's taciturn assistant through a door and into a waiting room. At the far end of this was a narrow, funnel-like passageway that ended not in a door but in a window. As they entered the room two women in mufti rose and turned towards them. They introduced themselves as having come from Berebury Hospital. ‘Helen Meadows, director of nursing,' said the taller woman.

‘Colleen Bryant, modern matron,' said the other.

‘Ah…' As far as Sloan was concerned the slight woman in front of him bore no connection to the legendary matrons cast in the Florence Nightingale mode on whose memory his mother had brought him up. He promptly resolved that this appellation be kept from Superintendent Leeyes: matron, perhaps; modern, no – the two words together a red rag to a bull. Neither woman carried the weight of uniform, either. A plain-clothes man himself, he often missed its unspoken authority.

The director of nursing was saying, ‘Lucy Lansdown was due on duty at the hospital at half past seven this morning, Inspector, but when I was told she hadn't reported to the ward by nine o'clock we naturally instituted enquiries.'

Sloan nodded, wondering briefly why it was that the higher up a professional ladder everyone climbed the more circumspect their speech became. Perhaps there was a moral there somewhere…

The woman was still speaking. ‘Since it was highly unusual for her not to come to work we sent a porter round but there was no answer to her knocking…'

‘The bird had flown,' muttered Detective Constable Crosby impatiently under his breath.

‘She was not there,' finished the director of nursing, hardened to irreverence.

‘You didn't telephone?' said Sloan.

The tiniest frown crossed the woman's face. ‘I'm afraid that there are some of our staff who decline to give us their home telephone numbers. It means that we can't call them in when they are off duty.'

‘That's a good idea—' began Crosby.

‘If you would both come this way, then, please, ladies,' interrupted Sloan, making for the viewing end of the room and anxious not to put words into their mouths.

He stood back while the two women advanced to the window and looked through the glass at the body beyond. It was placed on a trolley, clearly in sight but out of touch, only the head being visible.

Helen Meadows took a deep breath, and visibly wincing, said, ‘Yes, Inspector, that is Staff Nurse Lucy Lansdown.'

‘And I was talking to her only yesterday,' murmured Colleen Bryant, equally distressed. ‘Poor Lansdown.'

Detective Inspector Sloan, officer of the Crown, had forgotten that there were other institutions, too, where surnames held sway.

‘The wonder of death is nearly as mysterious as the wonder of life,' sighed Helen Meadows, the director of nursing. It was something she had said many times before having found it went down well with newly bereaved families.

Detective Inspector Sloan, police officer, was thinking of something else. ‘Yesterday? When yesterday?' he said swiftly.

Colleen Bryant frowned. ‘In the morning. That was when she first came on duty and she reminded me then that she had arranged to have some time off later that day to attend a funeral.'

‘Did she happen to say whose funeral?' asked Sloan, leading the way back to the waiting room end of the viewing room.

The modern matron shook her head. ‘No, and I didn't ask, but she was going home to change first.' She hesitated. ‘She didn't seem inordinately upset or anything like that if that's what you wanted to know.'

‘It helps,' said Sloan. He took out his notebook. ‘So would anything else you can tell me about her.'

‘She wasn't planning to come back on duty afterwards – I think the service was somewhere out in the country – so I can't tell you anything about the funeral or what she did afterwards,' said Colleen Bryant.

‘How long had she been working at the hospital here, for instance?'

The more senior nurse answered him, producing a record card as she did so. ‘Nearly three years now. She did her training over at Calleford – there's a big teaching hospital there – and then did a stint at the cottage hospital at Kinnisport. Then she came to us.'

‘On promotion?'

The director of nursing nodded. ‘Yes. To staff nurse.'

‘What about next of kin?'

The woman consulted the record card. ‘A brother in the North of England.'

Detective Inspector Sloan copied the name and address into his notebook.

‘We haven't been in touch with him yet,' began the nursing officer tentatively.

‘You can leave that to us,' Sloan said authoritatively. An experienced professional from the local force could not only impart the bad news but would be more able to assess the response to it. And glean what he or she could from the relatives. ‘In fact, we would very much appreciate it if you didn't mention her name to anyone at this stage. Not until we've contacted her relatives.'

The women, no strangers to the importance of confidentiality, seemed relieved. Helen Meadows nodded. ‘We quite understand.'

‘Tell me,' he said, ‘had she seemed depressed at all?'

‘Not that we were aware of,' answered the senior nurse with circumspection.

‘I'm sure we would have noticed,' put in the modern matron. ‘It's not an easy thing to hide, anyway. She would have said, too, I'm sure, if there had been anything wrong.'

‘No run of unexpected deaths on her ward or anything like that?' asked Sloan.

‘No, and I can assure you, Inspector, that that is something that is always looked into if they do happen,' said Colleen Bryant firmly.

‘I'm glad to hear it,' said Sloan, forbearing to mention several spectacular cases in recent times when they hadn't been. ‘And there is no suggestion that she had been distressed over the death of any particular patient?'

The nursing officer stirred. ‘Nurses are taught to leave the worries of the ward behind when they remove their uniforms. Life would be intolerable otherwise.'

Detective Inspector Sloan said warmly that he was glad to hear it, wishing all the while that this was something he had been taught when a raw constable. It would have saved him a good few sleepless nights in the course of his career. ‘Now, if you would just sign a few forms for us…We'll keep in touch, of course.' He put them in front of the two women and said casually, ‘By the way, do you know anything about her private life? Had she been lucky in love?'

‘I couldn't say, Inspector,' said the senior nurse in tones that conveyed the unspoken message that she wouldn't say if she could.

‘She hadn't been lucky in love,' said the younger woman firmly. ‘She'd had a break-up with someone a couple of years ago and I don't think there's been anyone since.' She frowned. ‘I rather think that's why she came over here from Calleford.'