Stiff News (10 page)

Miss Bentley tapped the floor with her walking stick and the others stopped talking at once. ‘Now,' she said peremptorily, ‘will someone kindly tell me exactly what has been going on?'

‘We don't know,' said Captain Markyate.

‘Can't understand it at all,' said Hamish MacIver. The spick and span former Military Person of the morning had gone. Now he just looked a tired old man.

‘Who on earth would have wanted to kill Gertie?' asked Walter Bryant of no one in particular. ‘She'd been dying for ages anyway.'

‘Her son?' suggested Peter Markyate, taking this literally. ‘Well,' he said, looking round, ‘presumably he gets all her money.'

The Brigadier tugged his moustache. ‘Dammit, the fellow hardly ever visited his mother.'

‘And never stayed very long when he did, either,' sniffed Markyate. ‘He usually said he had to leave pretty soon because of his wife.'

‘As well he might.' Walter Bryant leaned forward. ‘He always left Julia in the car park if she came with him. I know because I used to see her waiting there while I was waiting for Miss Ritchie to come and take me for a run.'

Hamish MacIver muttered under his breath, ‘Take you for a ride, you mean.'

‘Now, Hamish…' Bryant bristled.

‘Sorry,' apologized the Brigadier gruffly.

‘So when he did come to see his mother,' said Peter Markyate, ‘he was alone with her.'

‘What are you getting at, Peter?' asked the Brigadier.

‘You only need one opportunity to kill,' said Walter Bryant, eagerly edging his electric wheelchair forward. ‘I remember when A Company first came under fire at Wadi el Gebra and…'

‘Walter,' Miss Bentley gave an exasperated snort, ‘I don't think what you did at Wadi el Gebra has a lot of bearing on what we're talking about today.'

It was the Brigadier who flushed while Markyate intervened. ‘Steady on,' he said earnestly. ‘We couldn't have managed there without old Walter. Those terrible German tanks…'

Miss Bentley ruthlessly cut this military reminiscence short. ‘That's not the point. What I want to know is why Gertie thought she was going to be murdered.' She searched the faces of the others carefully. ‘What exactly made her think that?'

‘That's what we don't know,' said the Brigadier. ‘That's the trouble.'

Miss Bentley looked round. ‘Didn't she tell anyone?'

‘Not us, anyway,' declared MacIver.

‘Not Matron, either,' said Markyate, ‘because I asked her.'

‘That I can believe,' said Miss Bentley trenchantly, ‘because Matron would have done something straight away.'

They all nodded. On this they were agreed. Matron was a woman of action.

MacIver said, ‘Believe you me, Hetty, we're as perplexed as everyone else.'

‘Hmm,' said Miss Bentley, wearing a facial expression which over the years had withered staff, parents and pupils alike. ‘It isn't,' she remarked thoughtfully, ‘as if Gertie had held with all this medical business of Living Wills. You know, signing statements when you're fit and well that you don't want to be revived if you're ever so ill that your quality of life has gone.'

Peter Markyate said, ‘She wasn't ever one to hand decisions over to anyone else. Not Gertie.'

‘And definitely not to doctors,' said Bryant.

‘Rather not.' Captain Markyate endorsed this immediately. ‘And she told 'em so at the hospital, too. Don't you remember how she got quite upset when some whippersnapper of a house physician asked her if she wanted to be resuscitated if she collapsed in there. Life was always worth living, she said. Gave them her curtain lecture on the importance of enjoying life to the full.'

‘And to the bitter end,' said Bryant.

‘One of her favourite sayings, if you remember,' said Hamish MacIver, ‘was that life was quite short enough as it was.'

‘And that one about “the best was yet to be”,' said Markyate gruffly. ‘Remember?'

‘She wasn't riddled with arthritis,' said Miss Bentley feelingly.

‘Gertie always seemed quite content with things as they were,' murmured Markyate. ‘That was one of the best things about her.'

The Brigadier said, ‘She wouldn't ever become a member of the Escape Committee.'

‘Not ever,' agreed Markyate. ‘I mean,' he added, flustered, ‘she hadn't joined and then changed her mind, if you know what I mean. Some people,' he bumbled on, ‘do.'

‘I can understand that,' volunteered Walter Bryant, looking a little embarrassed. ‘Take myself, for instance. Knowing Margot Ritchie has wrought a big change in the way I now see things … I'm resigning with immediate effect.'

Miss Bentley looked as if she was about to speak but then thought better of it.

‘I'm thinking very differently these days,' he went on earnestly, ‘about almost everything.'

‘Circumstances alter cases,' said the Brigadier diplomatically.

‘Hmm,' said Miss Bentley again.

‘Elizabeth Forbes just changed her mind,' put in Peter Markyate, ‘between one day and the next.'

‘Don't know why, I'm sure,' said the Brigadier. ‘It's all right for old Walter here, but any change in circumstances there, poor woman, was for the worse surely.'

Walter Bryant looked shrewdly across at him. ‘And what about Maisie Carruthers, Hamish? Will she join now she's here, do you think? Or doesn't she believe in our Escape Committee and the Almstone Pragmatic Sanction?'

The Brigadier stiffened visibly, his face turning a turkey-red. ‘I really have no idea at all,' he said distantly. ‘You'll have to ask her that yourselves. I'm keeping out of it.'

*   *   *

In Sloan's book ‘getting moving' also included interviewing Judge Calum Gillespie. That aged legal gentleman received Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby in his room at the Manor with an old-fashioned courtesy.

‘Is this a duty visit, officers,' he enquired, ‘or may I offer you both a glass of Madeira? I've got some very passable Old Trinity House Bual here if you would like it.'

‘Duty, I'm afraid, sir,' said Sloan. He knew full well that in the Judge's private world officers and gentlemen and just plain officers were two quite different categories of men.

‘Pity. You will, I trust, not think me uncivil if I myself indulge?'

‘Indeed not,' said Sloan truthfully. If there was one Latin tag fully appreciated by every policeman it was
in vino veritas.

‘At my time of life a little alcohol helps keep the arteries open.' Judge Gillespie tottered to a side table and unstoppered a cut-glass decanter. Sloan watched as the neck of the decanter danced dangerously over the sherry glass. Miraculously, though, it never actually touched it and equally marvellously the Judge carried the full glass back without actually spilling it. He sat down and took a sip, saying, ‘Ah, that's better. Now, settle down and tell me why you've come to see me. I don't get many visitors from the – ah – outside world these days.'

‘We have reason to believe that the late Mrs Powell,' began Sloan without preamble, ‘thought she was being murdered.'

‘And does anyone else think so?' Two bright birdlike eyes regarded the two policemen with lively interest.

‘No one whom we know about,' said Sloan with care.

‘And was she?' The Judge turned his head to one side quizzically. ‘Murdered, I mean.'

‘We don't know yet.' Sloan saw no reason for prevarication. The Judge might have got a tremor but he still seemed to have all his marbles as well.

‘Ah…' Calum Gillespie took another appreciative sip of the Bual before using two hands to lower the glass onto an occasional table. ‘Would it be – er – presumptuous of me to enquire whether you, too, have grounds for thinking she might have been?'

‘Not, sir, what you could call really firm evidence,' replied Sloan, giving him full marks for getting straight to the heart of the matter. ‘Not yet.'

‘I see.' The Judge drew his eyebrows together in a prodigious frown and became sunk in thought. ‘Difficult for you … for everybody.'

Detective Inspector Sloan, experienced giver of evidence, waited much as he would have done – did – in court. Judges always took as long as they needed – as long as they wanted – to think. It was one of their privileges. It was not for them to be harried into ill-considered speech by counsel or trapped into the all too revealing ‘response immediate'.

‘And would I be right,' the old man said at long last, ‘in concluding therefore that the result of any post-mortem examination has so far been inconclusive?'

‘Awaiting the full report,' said Sloan ambiguously. Not only had the old boy got all his marbles but they were patently in excellent working order.

‘Why, then, Inspector, might I ask, have you come to see me?'

‘For background,' said Sloan glibly. Too glibly, because Crosby seemed to think that the word needed amplification.

The constable looked earnestly at the frail old man and said in loud tones, ‘We want to know, sir, if there's been any dirty work at the crossroads that you know about here at the Manor.'

‘There's always been dirty work at the crossroads, Constable,' the Judge said unexpectedly.

Crosby said, ‘I know but…'

‘Because the crossroads were always where they had the gibbet,' said Calum Gillespie hortatively, reaching for his glass of Madeira.

‘I didn't mean then,' protested Crosby. ‘I meant now.'

‘And they had it there,' went on the nonagenarian, serenely disregarding the detective constable's remarks, ‘because the crossroads were usually where the parish boundaries met and they always had the gibbet on the boundary if they could … saved having two and kept it out of your own backyard.'

‘Quite so,' Detective Inspector Sloan came in smoothly, reminding himself that in the early days of this Judge they had hanged men. And women. What Crosby needed was hanging out to dry. He leaned forward and said, ‘I wonder, sir, if you would care to tell us why you are so very attached to your old coat?'

The glass that had so nearly reached Judge Calum Gillespie's lips fell suddenly out of his nerveless hands, sending its delectable contents spilling out stickily over the old man's suit.

‘Why have you come?' he quavered breathlessly, his face turning an unhealthy shade of purple. ‘Who sent you here?'

Chapter Eleven

Early or late
They stoop to fate

‘Then what happened?' Superintendent Leeyes wanted to know. As was always his wont, he was sitting comfortably in the relative calm of his own office.

‘He rolled over and played dead,' said Detective Inspector Sloan, who was standing uneasily at the other side of the Superintendent's desk. He and Crosby had got back to Berebury Police Station at long last only to find Leeyes ready and waiting, spider-like, to rush out and ensnare them in his web. ‘For all that he'd been a judge in his day.'

‘Which he wasn't, I take it?' Leeyes said. ‘Dead, I mean.'

‘No, sir,' said Sloan. ‘Far from it, in fact.'

‘Alive and kicking,' contributed Crosby.

‘Oh, we whistled up a couple of care staff pretty quickly,' said Sloan, ‘and they brisked about a bit. Got him cleaned up and so forth and then into bed, but…'

‘But he wouldn't talk to us at all after that, sir,' put in the detective constable. ‘Couldn't get a dicky bird out of him for love nor money.'

‘And we can't make him talk,' said Leeyes more than a little wistfully. Some of the more liberal provisions of the new Police and Criminal Evidence Act had not gone down at all well with the Superintendent of F Division of the Calleshire County Constabulary.

‘No, sir,' replied Sloan rather more firmly than perhaps he should have done. ‘We can't.'

‘Was he mute of malice?' enquired Leeyes with interest. ‘We might get him for that.'

‘More like mute of enlightened self-interest,' said Sloan, who had himself picked something up from the class the Superintendent had once attended on ‘The Whig Supremacy'.

Leeyes glared at his two subordinates, the reference now quite lost upon him. ‘So what exactly is going on out there?'

‘Something, I'm sure,' said Sloan fairly, before Crosby could speak, ‘but we don't know exactly what. Yet.'

‘Well, you'd better find out pretty quickly,' said Leeyes, ‘because we'll have old Locombe-Stableford on our backs in no time at all. To say nothing,' he added gloomily, ‘of the press. I can see the headlines now.'

So unfortunately could Sloan. And you couldn't get anything cornier than ‘Mystery at the Manor'. Or ‘Who Moved Mysterious Figure in the Bedroom?' Bedrooms always made good headlines. Figures in bedrooms, even better.

Leeyes shuffled some papers about on his desk. ‘All I can say, Sloan, is if the pathologist can't come up with the answer, then you'll have to.'

‘I don't know about the deceased and her last letter, sir,' he said, ignoring this, ‘but my own feeling is that Judge Gillespie knew exactly what he was doing when he dropped his sherry glass and started playing dumb crambo with us.'

‘It seems to me,' pronounced Leeyes crustily, ‘that the only people out there who don't seem to know what they are doing are you and Crosby here.'

Crosby took this literally. ‘Could be, sir. All the others seem to be sticking together. After all, they or their husbands were all in the same regiment together.'

‘And,' pounced Leeyes, ‘I suppose that any minute now one of you is going to tell me that everyone in the place has been trained to kill silently and without trace as well.'

Sloan was only half listening. His mind was already running through all that would have to be done the next day. Like those who had buried Sir John Moore at Corunna, he too could only bitterly think of the morrow.