‘That’s all right, Sloan,’ Doctor Dabbe said amiably. ‘No need to stand on ceremony. Not where crime is concerned.’
‘Crime?’ pounced Sloan. ‘Here?’
‘The skin doesn’t look normal, especially round the mouth and eyes,’ said the pathologist absently, still studying the hanging man and in no way put out by the constable’s comment.
Detective Inspector Sloan said crisply to Williams, ‘I’d like some photographs of the face, please.’ Dyson was already setting up an arc lamp at the other side of the room.
‘Say cheese,’ said Williams, approaching the hanging man with his camera.
Sloan took a deep breath. He was about to bring all and sundry to order when he changed his mind and said nothing. His old mentor when he was a rooky constable – that highly experienced Station Sergeant – had more than once lectured him on the importance of levity in the face of tragedies: only other people’s tragedies, that is, not your own. It was sometimes, he would say, better than various other ways of not coping, including kicking the cat, taking it out on the children and having nightmares. Detective Inspector Sloan was the first to admit that the dead man here was not a pretty sight and he therefore kept his peace.
Doctor Dabbe, at least, remained totally professional. ‘There are burn marks on the face and you can see evidence of lachrymation which has coursed down the cheeks prior to death.’
‘Tear gas,’ concluded Sloan immediately, his mind starting to run along quite new lines. The atmosphere in the room changed suddenly when he murmured softly, ‘It’s not called Captive Spray for nothing, is it?’
‘It is more than a possibility, Sloan. I might be able to confirm it at the autopsy,’ said the pathologist. ‘Tear gas can sometimes leave traces in the body after death.’
‘If you do find …’ began Sloan, a possible whole new scenario begin to flood into his mind while the phrase ‘assisted suicide’ took on a whole new meaning.
‘And I’ll check up on the knot too,’ promised Doctor Dabbe. ‘I daresay we’ll find it the usual Hangman’s …’
‘Send the rabbit round the tree and then down the hole, up and round again. Twice,’ chanted Crosby. ‘Then send the knot up the line.’
‘Thank you, Crosby,’ said Sloan stonily. ‘We all know how to make a Hangman’s Knot.’ Now he came to think of it, perhaps not everybody did, but it was beginning to look as if there had been someone about who not only knew how to tie a hangman’s knot, but how to use CS gas. He motioned the photographers to record the upturned chair lying on the floor near the dangling man and the beam over which the body had been suspended.
‘He was quite a small man,’ Sloan said, unconsciously thinking aloud, ‘so he wouldn’t have been too heavy to haul up.’
‘We’ll be weighing him, won’t we, Burns?’ promised the pathologist.
The ever-silent Burns nodded.
‘Render him temporarily unconscious, put the rope round his neck, throw the other end over the beam and heave away,’ suggested Sloan.
‘Could be done,’ agreed the pathologist.
‘Crosby,’ ordered Sloan, ‘measure the height of the seat of the chair from the floor – without touching it, mind you.’
‘Yes, sir.’ The constable bent over it and extended a metal tape.
‘Now measure the height of the body from the floor,’ ordered Sloan.
‘Bingo,’ said Crosby.
‘By which I take it you mean they are the same,’ said Sloan frostily.
‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.’
‘And then, Crosby, you can rustle up the Scenes of Crime people.’
‘Charlie Marsden and his Merry Men,’ said Detective Constable Crosby. ‘Will do. I’ll ask for a few portlies too, to guard the back lane.’
‘And after that, Crosby,’ said Sloan, rising above this slur on the uniformed branch, ‘you can go round and chat up the landlord at the Railway Tavern before he finds out what’s happened. We’ll need to set up an incident room and I’ll alert Tod Morton that we’ll be needing a hearse when we’re done with the body here. I’ll be in touch with the Coroner myself.’
Doctor Dabbe said so would he. ‘When I’ve done the post-mortem,’ he added. ‘And examined the hands properly to see if he put up a fight.’
‘And what I will want to know, among other things,’ said the detective inspector, ‘is whether or not the deceased knew whoever came in …’
‘Always presuming that someone did,’ pointed out the pathologist. ‘Remember it’s too soon to say for sure, Sloan.’
‘Friend or foe,’ said Crosby, looking round. ‘That’s what we want to know, isn’t it?’
‘Whichever way you look at it,’ observed Williams, the photographer, ‘it can’t have been a friend. Not if he ended up swinging like this.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Detective Constable Crosby slid into the saloon bar of the Railway Tavern as instructed after the manner born. The landlord stopped polishing glasses and asked him what he was having.
With a fine show of ignorance, Crosby asked him what the local brew was.
‘Stranger in these parts, then?’ The landlord waved his hand in a gesture designed to take in the whole area.
‘Sort of,’ said Crosby obliquely. ‘I’ve just come over from Pelling.’
‘Try our best bitter.’
‘Will do,’ said the constable, temporarily putting to the back of his mind all he had been told about not drinking on duty. He waited until it had been drawn and he had taken a first sip. He nodded appreciatively and then jerked his shoulder in the direction of Norman Potts’ house. ‘What’s going on down the road? There’s a load of police cars outside one of the houses there.’
‘Where?’ The landlord shot to the door and looked out. ‘Well, I’ll be blowed. That’s Norman Potts’ house. What’s he been and gone and done now, I wonder?’
‘What does he usually do?’ asked Crosby, taking another sip.
‘Make trouble,’ said the landlord briefly. ‘Big trouble, usually.’
‘Bit of low life, is he?’
The landlord shook his head. ‘No, not that, but he’ll pick a fight with anyone over anything, if he can. Combative, if you ask me. Or do I mean aggressive?’
‘What about?’ asked Crosby, burying his face in his glass of beer.
‘Money and family,’ said the landlord. ‘In that order. He owes me. Had to throw him out last week but he still came back. Wanted to borrow some more to tide him over.’ He snorted. ‘At least, that’s what he said. Me, I think it’s the gee gees.’
‘Some wives,’ advanced Detective Constable Crosby, bachelor, trying to sound wise, ‘will spend every penny a man’s got.’
‘It’s not that,’ said the landlord. ‘He had a wife but she took off. Or threw him out. I don’t know which. Don’t blame her myself. He must have been a real pain to have around. No, it’s horses with him.’ He paused and then said after some thought, ‘Not that they’re any more reliable than women.’
‘They don’t answer back,’ observed Crosby.
‘No more they do,’ agreed the landlord. A smile split his features. ‘And some of them are faster. Only some of them, mind you. The ones you don’t put money on.’
Crosby grinned appreciatively and said he’d have another half. ‘Got a lot on the slate, has he?’
‘Too much,’ said the landlord grimly. ‘Said he was working on something new out in the country and would pay me back soon but if you ask me, he wasn’t working on anything.’
‘Not up and about?’
‘Not up at all, I should say. Lazy beggar except on race days.’
‘And when he did work was it anything to do with flowers?’
The landlord gave Crosby a curious look. ‘Funny you should say that. Do you know him, then?’
‘No,’ said the constable truthfully.
‘He was always going on about his stepfather doing him out of his share of a nursery. I wouldn’t have thought he’d know one end of
a daisy from the other myself. Not until he starts pushing them up.’
Resisting the considerable temptation to say that that was just what the late – and apparently unlamented – Norman Potts would be doing quite soon, Crosby drank up and took his leave.
In his day Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan, like all policemen, had done his time as a breaker of bad news. Sometimes it was as the unhappy herald of sudden death after a road traffic accident, sometimes as the deliverer of an unwelcome arrest warrant. Only very occasionally did the harbinger bear intelligence that the recipient was pleased to hear. The finding of a live lost child was one of them although the tracing of an aged demented relative who had gone walkabout usually only occasioned modified rapture.
Thus responses normally ran the gamut from grief to joy and Sloan had gradually become inured to them all. What he hadn’t experienced before, though, was such an equivocal reception to the information given.
‘Norman dead?’ echoed a bewildered Marilyn Potts when the two policemen arrived at Capstan Purlieu Plants with the news. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Quite sure, madam,’ said Sloan steadily.
‘Tell us more,’ said Anna Sutherland, standing protectively behind her friend. ‘Where, for instance?’
‘At his home in Berebury,’ said Sloan, telling the truth but not the whole truth.
‘What on earth from?’ asked Marilyn.
‘That we don’t know for certain,’ said Sloan even more truthfully.
‘But he wasn’t even old,’ protested Marilyn.
‘That we don’t know either,’ said Sloan. The age of the asphyxiated man hanging from a beam in a cottage had not been easy to assess from his face. ‘Not for sure.’
‘So you’re just telling me that he’s dead, are you?’ said Marilyn Potts truculently. ‘Is that all?’
‘Why are you telling her this anyway?’ intervened Anna Sutherland brusquely. ‘He and Marilyn were divorced. She told you that yesterday. Good grief man, you haven’t come here to ask her to identify him, have you?’
‘Not at this stage,’ said Sloan cautiously. Mortuary technicians could work wonders but it took time.
Marilyn Potts began a low keening.
‘What’s it got to do with Marilyn now in any case?’ demanded Anna Sutherland only just short of belligerently.
Sloan took refuge in police-speak. ‘There are certain anomalies surrounding the death.’
‘What does that mean?’ demanded Anna roughly.
‘That there are some enquiries still to be made about the deceased …’ began Sloan. These days the duty of candour was enjoined upon the medical profession but not, thank goodness, on the police.
Yet.
‘The deceased …’ Marilyn Potts choked on the word. ‘It’s poor Norman who you’re talking about, remember …’
‘What enquiries?’ asked Anna Sutherland.
‘The provenance of some orchids is one of them,’ said Sloan.
Marilyn Potts stared at him. ‘Orchids? Are you joking, Inspector?’
‘Certainly not, madam. I am quite serious. I understand you were at Staple St James giving a talk on the subject yesterday evening.’
‘What about it?’
Detective Inspector Sloan, all policeman now, turned to Anna Sutherland and said, ‘And you, madam? Where were you?’
‘She was with me,’ said Marilyn Potts quickly before her friend could speak.
Anna Sutherland said quite calmly, ‘I was with Marilyn in the sense that I drove her over to Staple St James but I stayed in the car outside the hall while she spoke.’
‘Why?’ asked Crosby.
The older woman replied, ‘You probably don’t understand, constable, but it’s quite difficult to deliver a lecture when there’s someone you know well in the audience.’
Detective Inspector Sloan didn’t need telling that. His wife, Margaret, knew it too. There had been that trying time when he had been lured into giving a talk to her Tuesday evening club, when to his relief she had fled to the kitchen. He hoped the ladies had forgotten the occasion but he hadn’t. He asked the two women at Capstan Purlieu instead, ‘Have you any other orchids here apart from the damaged ones we saw yesterday?’
Anna Sutherland muttered, ‘The dead ones, you mean,’ under her breath.
‘Of course I have,’ said Marilyn with dignity. ‘I brought some back from Staple St James last night after I had given my talk.’ She waved a hand. ‘They’re in one of the sheds over there.’
‘With the door closed,’ said Anna Sutherland drily.
‘I’m keeping them for Enid Osgathorp,’ said Marilyn. ‘She’s bound to ask for them when she gets back.’
‘Bound to,’ contributed Anna Sutherland. ‘No flies on old Enid. If she’s paid for them, then they’re hers.
Detective Inspector Sloan said that he would like to see them.
‘No problem.’ Marilyn Potts led the way to a shed behind the cottage and flung the door open. ‘Here we are, Inspector. Six orchids. All different. They’re Enid Osgathorp’s by rights, you understand.’
Detective Inspector Sloan, who wasn’t sure that he understood anything at this point, nodded.
As they entered the shed, Sloan pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket and summoned up a photograph of the two orchids on the sideboard in Norman Potts’ house. He compared them with those in the shed. Neither bore any strong resemblance to those standing on the decking in front of him. ‘These orchids,’ he said, ‘which you presumably collected from Jack Haines for your talk last night …’ If he remembered rightly their provenance had cropped up when he was over there yesterday.
‘That’s right,’ sniffed Marilyn Potts. ‘I did.’
‘How many did you take with you last night to your talk?’ he asked.
‘Six,’ she said, ‘and I brought six back.’
Sloan ran his eye along the row. There were four orchids there.
‘I’m sure I brought them all back,’ she began, looking more worried than ever. She turned to her friend. ‘Didn’t I, Anna?’
‘You did,’ said Anna Sutherland, staring at the four orchids. ‘I helped you carry them in.’
Detective Constable Crosby looked up and said brightly. ‘She counted them all out but she didn’t count them all back.’
‘Oh, yes, she did,’ Anna Sutherland contradicted him flatly. ‘Six of them.’ She pointed to the photograph in Sloan’s hand. ‘I saw them too – including two Dracula orchids just like those.’
‘Dracula was a vampire, wasn’t he?’ remarked Crosby to nobody in particular.
‘Yes,’ said Anna Sutherland. ‘A blood-sucker.’
‘I brought six orchids back with me,’ insisted Marilyn, looking troubled. ‘I know I did. You’ll back me up on that, won’t you, Anna?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, adding enigmatically, ‘but we’re both heavy sleepers.’
The police car had scarcely faded from view at Capstan Purlieu Nursery before Marilyn Potts turned to her friend Anna Sutherland and started to speak. She seemed to be having some difficulty in forming her words.
‘Anna ….’
‘What is it?’
‘Last night.’
‘What about last night?’
‘When we were over at Staple St James …’
‘What about it?’ said the older woman discouragingly.
‘You wouldn’t come into the Hall when I was speaking.’
‘You know how my being in the audience puts you off. You’re always saying so. I must say I myself don’t understand why you feel that way but …’ she opened her hands expressively, ‘there you are.’
‘No,’ said Marilyn.
‘No what?’
‘No, you weren’t there.’ Marilyn flushed and went on awkwardly, ‘I came out, you see. Someone in the audience wanted one of our plant lists and I’d forgotten to take them into the hall with me so I said I’d get one for him from the car.’ Her voice trailed off and she said miserably, ‘And you weren’
t there.’
‘No more I was,’ agreed Anna Sutherland easily. ‘I’d gone for a bit of a potter round, that’s all.’
‘I thought we were saving petrol now we’re so broke.’
‘I didn’t go far.’
‘You took your time about it then.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I came out again later on and you still weren’t there.’
‘I was there when you were ready to come home and that’s all that matters.’
‘No,’ said her friend, looking troubled. ‘No, it isn’t, Anna.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
‘Four orchids and not six?’ exploded Superintendent Leeyes, sounding tetchy. ‘Is this a criminal case or a flower show, Sloan? What on earth is going on at Capstan Purlieu and in Berebury too, for that matter? First blackmail and now a doubtful death.’
‘I don’t know exactly, sir,’ admitted Sloan, ‘but Norman Potts had connections over there.’
‘And what about that old party missing from Pelling? Is she connected with of all these floral shenanigans too? Or the death here in Berebury? And where does her blackmailing come in?’
‘I don’t know that either,’ said Sloan, spelling out what he did know about Enid Maude Osgathorp’s connections with events to date.
‘Was she blackmailing Norman Potts too?’ the superintendent enquired with interest. ‘He presumably once lived at Pelling since he’s Jack Haines’ stepson and so she would have known his medical history too.’
‘We’re already looking into that, sir. The deceased was certainly said to be short of money,’ said Sloan. ‘At least the landlord of the Railway Tavern told us he was.’
‘I wonder what unmentionable lurgy he had been suffering from?’ mused the superintendent. ‘That’s if the missing person was blackmailing him too.’
‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure, sir,’ said Sloan astringently. What he himself really wanted to know was what exactly had been wrong with Benedict Feakins that could account for behaviour bordering on the bizarre.
‘There you are, then,’ said Leeyes ambiguously.
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