Some Die Eloquent (24 page)

‘Malcolm Darnley of Wansdyke and Darnley?'

Sloan nodded. ‘You see, sir, when I came to think of it, it was the only thing that hadn't happened yet.'

‘What was?'

‘His coming home tomorrow … today, I mean.' That reminded Sloan of something. ‘Sir, I must be getting back to the hospital as quickly as I can.'

‘What had his coming home got to do with Beatrice Wansdyke?' insisted Leeyes. You didn't get to be superintendent without being able to override the wishes of other people when it suited you.

‘I'm not quite sure … yet … it was something Crosby said.'

‘Crosby?' echoed Leeyes in tones of pure disbelief.

‘About the source of the money.'

‘Out of the mouths of babes,' conceded Leeyes.

‘If it wasn't inheritance or the proceeds of a tidy-sized job …' Babes. Sloan kept still with difficulty. He shouldn't be here at all, really. Not now.

‘We know it wasn't any of them,' said Leeyes impatiently. ‘We checked on all those early on.' That ‘early on' was Tuesday and today was Thursday surprised neither of them. Each criminal investigation had its own timetable: Sloan would not be surprised to know that someone was still looking for Jack the Ripper. There might even be a warrant out for Cain …

‘So,' went on Sloan, ‘when Crosby said what about it being big business money …'

‘I suppose,' mused the Superintendent, ‘when you think of some payroll snatches …'

‘Big business wouldn't think that sort of money so very out of the way,' pursued Sloan. ‘At least, I don't think it would.' He had himself been schooled on the principle that murder most foul could be done for a hat-pin let alone a hat but it didn't mean that there wasn't an opposite end to the same scale.

‘So?' Orders of magnitude didn't interest the Superintendent.

‘The only business round here that had anything to do with the case is –'

‘I know,' growled Leeyes. ‘Don't tell me.'

‘Wansdyke and Darnley.'

Leeyes grunted. ‘That well-known Berebury firm.'

‘Well-known in the plastics field, anyway,' said Sloan. He'd been doing what research he could in the last half-hour.

‘I don't see the connection,' objected Leeyes.

‘Neither do I, sir, yet.'

‘And I thought –' Leeyes was adept at shifting responsibility whenever he could – ‘from what you said that George Wansdyke was about the only one who didn't stand to benefit from what his aunt left in her will.'

‘That was the beauty of the whole thing, sir,' breathed Sloan, spoiling the effect by adding in a cautionary way, ‘I think.'

Leeyes started to raise an objection.

‘I'm hoping,' interposed Sloan swiftly, ‘that a chat with Malcolm Darnley will put us in the picture.'

‘And in the meantime?'

Sloan told him exactly what he proposed doing in the meantime.

Margaret Sloan wasn't asleep any longer.

Far from it.

Sloan had begun to frame uncertain sentences as he hurried along the corridor to the maternity unit. They faded from his lips as he entered the delivery room.

‘Margaret …'

She put out her hand.

‘You got my message,' he began as he stepped swiftly to her side.

He had sent Crosby down from Fleming Ward with it, reckoning that, next to a white coat, the wearing of pyjamas, dressing-gown and bandage gave one the easiest entree to almost everywhere in the hospital. Almost everywhere. Not to this ward, of course. He'd have got as far as the door, though. Even Crosby.

His wife looked at him almost without recognition, her mind elsewhere.

‘A job,' he said uneasily. ‘I was on a job.'

Wordlessly she tightened her grip on his hand.

Someone masked and gowned told him where to stand. He looked up. The voice behind the mask was familiar. He'd heard it before.

‘Inspector Sloan, I presume,' said the man.

He nodded. It was like studying an Identikit picture without hair, nose, and chin: and as tantalizing.

Margaret Sloan was trying to say something.

He immediately turned back to her.

At first no sound came.

He put his head near her lips.

‘Never off-duty,' she whispered, ‘are you?'

‘My dearest love …'

He started to perspire.

Those lonely souls who had never travelled far in love missed this road too.

The midwife was saying something behind her mask now.

Sloan moistened his lips. A man tended to forget that the Ship of Felicity once embarked upon berthed here. He wondered if a woman ever did.

‘Coming up to crowning, Doctor,' said the midwife more clearly.

So this was what they meant by that.

Love's majesty wore a crown and this was it.

He found himself taking deep gulps of breath, matching Margaret's. The French had a word for the pain that husbands suffered … someone had once told him what it was.
Couvade
. It had had no meaning at the time.

There was a moment not long after that when it crossed Sloan's mind that being born from Adam's rib in a deep sleep must be a better way than this …

Once he remembered looking at his watch but it meant nothing now: time didn't enter this world.

It was Thursday, that was all.

Thursday's child has far to go.

A sudden scurrying among the professionals told him that this child – Thursday's child – his child – was making a move.

It was just a little later when, though he didn't realize it in so many words, Sloan became deeply committed to the Classical Greek School of Midwifery. Had anyone asked him then and there he would have opted for his child springing – like Athena – fully armed from the forehead of Zeus.

Presently that feeling, too, passed when they all – man, woman and child – became submerged in a welter of clinical activity and ordinary human excitement.

Then the man in the mask spoke again. He recognized the voice now. It belonged to Dr Roger Elspin. He said, ‘Inspector Sloan, you have a son.'

It didn't seem wholly right that the first person to congratulate him should be a furtive little man lurking outside in the maternity ward corridor.

‘What are you doing here, Larky?' asked Sloan from all the eminence of cloud nine.

‘Same as you, Inspector. Being a father.'

‘I'll tell the midwife to keep an eye on her watch.'

‘Not on my account. I'm going straight these days,' insisted Larky Nolson earnestly. ‘Honest.'

‘Honest? You wouldn't know the meaning of the word, Larky …' Sloan floated on.

And the second person: a detective-constable with a bandage round his head. But fully dressed now. Sloan seized on him.

‘Come on, Crosby. We know where to go now.'

‘Do we, sir? Which way?'

‘Wansdyke and Darnley's, of course. Where else did you think?'

There was a little portable radio on George Wansdyke's desk in his office. It was tuned in to the programme which broadcast snippets of news as they came in and the latest news every hour on the hour. In between news flashes and weather reports a disc jockey played pop record after pop record. There was, however, no one in the office listening to it.

‘He was here a minute ago,' insisted a mystified secretary. ‘If you'll just wait I'll check to see if he's gone through to the works.'

‘Thank you,' said Sloan, moving over to Wansdyke's desk. There was just one memo on it. It was handwritten and was addressed to Bill Benfleet, Public Relations Manager, and was from George Wansdyke, Joint Managing Director. It was marked U
RGENT
and it read:

Subject: Tomorrow's new product announcement. This is to be cancelled forthwith and all press releases and publicity material recalled at once.

Detective-Inspector Sloan motioned Crosby to collect the memo. ‘We'll need that,' he said.

‘Exhibit A,' commented Crosby. ‘It's the only one we've got.'

‘There's an empty insulin bottle,' Sloan reminded him, ‘and some explosive clamped to a car …'

‘And a dead dog,' added Crosby lugubriously. ‘I'd forgotten Isolde.'

‘A funny mixture, I grant you.' Sloan frowned. ‘I reckon this memo was meant to be sent as soon as Wansdyke heard news of the explosion and his partner's death on the radio.'

‘And it didn't come.' Crosby grinned. ‘Did it?'

‘We can't find Mr Wansdyke,' said the secretary, coming back into the room. ‘I've tried Research and Development – he's often there – and the lab and the moulding shop …'

A telephone rang. She picked it up. ‘When … when? Oh, I see. Thank you … I'll tell him.' She put down the receiver. ‘That was the man on the gate. He says Mr Wansdyke left just after you arrived, Inspector, by car.'

‘Which way did he go?' interrupted Crosby.

‘He says he took the Kinnisport Road …'

‘The hoverport,' said Sloan quickly. ‘He won't get far.'

The subsequent road chase made traffic history in the County of Calleshire.

‘I take it,' said Superintendent Leeyes coldly later that morning, ‘that you are prepared to appease Inspector Harpe. I shall reprimand Constable Crosby myself.'

‘We got our man,' said Sloan simply. It was the police exegesis.

Crosby's turn of speed at the wheel had indicated complete recovery from his head injuries. George Wansdyke's could only point to total guilt. The latter was, however, not saying anything to anyone.

‘Which means,' declared Leeyes heavily, ‘that you'll have to do the explaining, Sloan.'

‘It's easier now that I've had a word with Malcolm Darnley,' admitted Sloan. ‘It was guesswork until then.'

Leeyes waited.

‘It all happened the way it did,' began Sloan slowly, ‘because Malcolm Darnley had a business trip scheduled to the States.'

‘Go on.'

‘That meant that George Wansdyke couldn't kill him when he wanted to.'

‘Hard luck,' said Leeyes vigorously.

‘He just wasn't there to be killed,' said Sloan. ‘It all hung on that.'

‘You couldn't be over-simplifying things, could you?' enquired the Superintendent sarcastically. ‘Why should Darnley come home and be killed?'

‘Not long before he went off on this trip,' said Sloan, ‘the firm of Wansdyke and Darnley came up with a discovery …'

‘Not Miss Wansdyke's do-it-yourself kit for making money out of air?'

‘No. A discovery about plastic – an important one.'

‘Ah, now we're getting somewhere.'

‘That's what Malcolm Darnley and George Wansdyke thought – each in his own way.' Sloan paused. ‘The trouble was that their ways were different ones.'

‘It happens with partners,' said Leeyes sagely. ‘They don't always see eye to eye.'

Sloan cleared his throat. ‘That was a bit of an understatement in this case.'

‘Especially marriage partners.'

‘The discovery,' said Sloan hastily, ‘according to Malcolm Darnley was both socially important and highly marketable.'

‘Bound to be troublesome, then,' said Leeyes cynically.

‘Not so much a discovery,' Sloan forged on, ‘as a new process involving a … a …' he shot a quick glance down at his notebook … ‘a synergist.'

Superintendent Leeyes did not speak. He just looked.

‘It's like a catalyst but different,' faltered Sloan. It was no use. You couldn't bone up on someone else's trade over the telephone in a few minutes especially when that person had just escaped death by a whisker and naturally wanted to know why. ‘A catalyst,' he continued in an unusually hortatory manner, ‘causes a reaction but remains unchanged by it.'

‘And a synergist?' enquired Leeyes silkily.

‘Causes a reaction but is itself changed in the process. It – er – potentiates things.'

‘Like murder?'

‘This … ingredient …' That was an easier word altogether. He would use it from now on. ‘The ingredient,' he forged on, ‘used in this new process they'd stumbled on will make some sorts of plastic eventually decay.'

‘Is that good or bad?' As far as the Superintendent was concerned it was a black and white world.

‘Used plastic is a great problem to society,' said Sloan, parrot-like. Listening to Malcolm Darnley was infectious. ‘Your old yoghurt carton stands to last longer than the Sphinx …'

‘Well?'

‘With this ingredient built in it would gradually become … er …' he hesitated before introducing yet another new word … ‘degradable and so decay.'

Leeyes, however, wasn't thinking about words. ‘This process, Sloan, was worth money?'

‘Big money,' agreed Sloan tacitly.

‘A quarter of a million pounds' worth of money?'

‘Precisely, sir.' He coughed. ‘Exactly, you might say.'

‘What then,' asked Leeyes simply, ‘was the problem?'

Detective-Inspector Sloan felt a momentary pang of sympathy for George Wansdyke as he tried to explain. ‘Malcolm Darnley was a conservation buff, sir. Mad about preserving the countryside.'

‘We all know that,' said Leeyes. ‘What about it?'

‘Malcolm Darnley,' said Sloan impressively, ‘thought that the world should have the process free.'

‘
Pro bono publico
,' breathed Leeyes, awestruck, ‘instead of a quarter of a million pounds?'

‘No more plastic cups in the Channel,' said Sloan, echoing a fanatic. ‘No more cows choking to death on plastic bags left in a field. Less detritus for eternity.'

The Superintendent was considering something quite different – something more in his own line. ‘There are more ways than one of killing the golden goose,' he said. Smaller rubbish dumps didn't excite him. Murder did.