The Trouble With Tortoises

by Evelyn James

  Clara could see all manner of complications and they had knocked the earlier feelings of peacefulness from her mind. Poor Jeremiah looked to be in a worse predicament than ever before.

  “If your friend wants more advice, tell him to pop over here,” Mr Cobb was continuing, oblivious to Clara’s worries. “I am quite happy to talk. It passes the time in the winter.”

  “I very much appreciate your help,” Clara replied. “And the pamphlet.”

  Mr Cobb looked pleased.

  “Any time.”

  He showed Clara out of the zoo, pausing at the gates with her.

  “If your friend does feel his tortoise is too much for him, I am sure I can find room here,” he offered.

  “You like tortoises a lot, Mr Cobb.”

  “I like all animals,” Mr Cobb replied, a shy smile crossing his face. “I think they all deserve a good home. This has been my life’s work, to make a haven for unwanted animals that are not dogs or cats, but also to inspire the young and offer education. It is ignorance that causes the most suffering, not cruelty. Most people, once made aware of what an animal’s true needs are, will respond admirably.”

  Clara put out her hand for Mr Cobb to shake.

  “You are a good man, Mr Cobb, if you ever require my help, do not hesitate to ask,” after they had shook hands, she produced one of her business cards from her handbag and gave it to him.

  “A private detective?”

  “For my sins, I am often tasked with locating lost pets. I am usually successful.”

  “Then, if I ever need your assistance, I shall be sure to call upon you,” Mr Cobb replied, though he seemed quite certain that would never be necessary. “I hope all goes well with your friend’s tortoise.”

  “Thank you and thank you for the leaflet.”

  “My pleasure,” Mr Cobb assured her, then he waved goodbye and closed the gate.

  Clara walked back through the park, flicking through the pages of the tortoise care pamphlet and reading snippets that caught her eye. Mr Malory had a lot to learn about the proper care of Jeremiah, she just hoped she would be able to find the tortoise safely, so he had the opportunity to make amends to the poor fellow.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “My dining room has turned into a… into a…” Annie scowled as the words failed her. “Into an artist’s studio, no, I mean…”

  Flustered she stopped talking and gave Clara a hard look.

  “Go see for yourself!”

  Clara had only just walked into the house and was still trying to get the cold out of her toes and fingers. The bitter winter wind had chapped her cheeks and they tingled unpleasantly as she was struck by the warmth of the house. She had been accosted by Annie almost the moment she arrived.

  “Explain to me again what they have done,” she said, trying to calm her irate friend.

  Annie threw up her hands, once again the right words not springing to mind in her temper.

  “Just… just look!”

  Clara obediently looked around the dining room door and spied Tommy and Harold leaning over the table which was covered in large sheets of paper. The papers contained drawings, many of them appearing to be of lopsided triangles, and numerous mathematical calculations. There were also lengths of string tied taut from the tops of furniture to the ground, she even saw that some had been attached to the coving around the edge of the ceiling with drawing pins. Clara frowned at this minor vandalism of her dining room.

  “Hello Clara.”

  Jerked from her thoughts, Clara turned and saw that Captain O’Harris was sitting in a chair in a corner, watching the others at work.

  “John!” Clara cried in delight. “I am pleased to see you. Sorry I did not glimpse you straight away. I was distracted.”

  Her eyes wandered from the man she loved to the strange strings ornamenting the room.

  “You see?” Annie said petulantly. “Where am I supposed to serve dinner? And with Captain O’Harris here too.”

  “We can eat up the kitchen table for once,” Clara said promptly. “I think this is important.”

  She frowned as she said it, as she was not entirely sure herself. Tommy and Harold were so absorbed in whatever they were doing that they had not even noticed her arrival.

  “It has been like this since they got home,” Annie bemoaned the unusual circumstances. “I shall have to serve lunch in the morning room. I just don’t know!”

  Annie retreated to the safety of her kitchen, defeated by the odd display in the dining room. O’Harris rose from his seat and kissed Clara on the cheek.

  “You are icy!”

  “It has turned colder outside. I can imagine us seeing snow before Christmas,” Clara gladly moved closer to him and welcomed the arm he slipped around her shoulder. “I might even enjoy Christmas if this whole mess can be worked out before then.”

  “Jao Leong’s death?”

  “Yes,” Clara replied. “The woman certainly knew how to make life complicated for everyone around her. Have they explained to you what they are doing?”

  “They have and I understood most of it,” O’Harris chuckled. “They have spent the last couple of hours attempting to work out the angle the bullet that killed Jao would have needed to have been fired from. It’s all rather trial and error at the moment, but I could see this having potential for future police investigations. Imagine being able to say where exactly a killer stood? It would help rule out or rule in suspects.”

  “If they can get the maths right,” Clara observed. “I am rather glad I am not attempting it. And the string?”

  “They have been using it to gauge trajectories, bit difficult with the limitations of the room.”

  Clara glanced at her ceiling, now perforated by numerous drawing pins.

  “It is rather like a spider’s web.”

  “That is not what it is meant to be,” Tommy had noticed her at last and looked up with a wry smile. “We needed practical models to test out our theories. It has proven harder than we thought to calculate correctly where the bullet must have been fired from.”

  Harold looked up as well.

  “The real issue, Clara, is that we do not know exactly where the bullet ended up. You see, the window was open, and the body’s final position only helps us a little. As you mentioned, Jao might have stepped back as she was shot, we cannot say and that means we have no fixed point to base our suppositions from,” Harold grimaced at the problem. “Imagine this, a person is stood before a wall and is shot, the bullet passes through them and hits the wall. Now we will have the point the bullet ended up, so we can produce an approximate place where it began. Better still if the bullet has travelled into, say, a wooden wall, and left us a channel. Now we can use that channel to tell us the angle the bullet entered the wall and project from it where the bullet might have come from.

  “The whole thing is even easier if the bullet had to travel through something before reaching the victim, say a windowpane, now we have a hole that tells us the direction the bullet was travelling before it hit its target. Do you see why that is important?”

  Clara opened her mouth, almost saying yes, then she hesitated and changed her mind.

  “Perhaps, help me a little bit more?”

  “Well, if we only have the trace of the bullet after it hits a person, we cannot be certain what we are seeing is accurate. When a bullet hits something dense, such as a human body, it can change direction, perhaps be knocked off course by a bone. Bullets travel in all manner of odd ways around the body, as I am sure Tommy can tell you.”

  “Seen a man shot in the leg where the bullet ended up close to his kidneys,” Tommy nodded. “And then there was the case of the fellow who was shot in the head and the bullet followed the contour of his skull perfectly before exiting without piercing it. Hurt like hell, but no permanent damage. Doctors found it remarkable.”

  “Obviously, in situations like that, trying to determine where a bullet came from is near impossible using mathematics. Though I hav
e proposed to Tommy that the study of the entry wound could provide the key. Even so, seeing as there is the possibility our victim moved as she was struck, it messes up all the calculations,” Harold looked at his papers, annoyed by the inconsiderate nature of the dying. “Now, if we know a bullet has passed through a single object smoothly before hitting the victim, well, we have that to help us. If it passes through something thin it won’t be knocked off course and we can use the hole as a guide to tell us the likely angle the bullet came from.

  “However, the window of the room was open, the bullet, if we presume it came from the ground, passed through nothing but air until it reached the victim, and it failed to leave her skull, instead lodging there. Which means we are starting all this work based on a crude assumption of where the woman was stood when she was shot. My calculations cannot be precise, instead I can only offer a range for them, and that is truly frustrating because, Clara, at one end of that range there is the possibility of someone shooting through that open window from the ground behind the lorry, while at the other end, it is impossible.”

  “Oh,” Clara said, and that single mumbled word summed up all her disappointment at this conclusion.

  She looked at the table, all the drawings and the many equations, and her heart sank. She had hoped Harold would give her conclusive proof that the shot could not have come from the ground, instead he had proved that it could have done – even worse, it could have been fired while the person was behind cover, implying they were deliberately aiming up at Jao. But who could have known she was there? Unless…

  Supposing someone heard or glimpsed the window being opened? Dawn had been coming, maybe a glimmer of light had caught on the rising windowpane and to the acutely alert men shooting for their lives, this glint had been like an alarm siren. Just like Harold had said, perhaps they had thought someone was going to try and snipe at them and they took aim first. They would not have hesitated for a moment, not when lives could depend on their actions. Who would have thought the person who opened the window would be unarmed and just an observer?

  Clara shut her eyes and felt her stomach drop. This was the worst news possible. O’Harris took her hand, tried to comfort her, but Clara could not be comforted in that moment, not when Chang could look upon this as proof the police were responsible for Jao’s death.

  Clara could not help feeling that Chang was reacting this way to spite her, as he blamed her too. She had been the one to think up the kidnapping plan, and yes he had wanted to have Jao stopped, but he had not wanted her dead and Chang could warp his thinking suitably enough to blame everyone bar himself or, more appropriately, his sister, for her death. He might not wish to strike directly at Clara, as he had some respect for her, but the inspector was another matter – Chang hated him simply because he was a policeman.

  “This may all change if I can speak to the coroner about how the bullet entered the woman’s skull,” Harold interrupted Clara’s doom and gloom. The desperate look on his face told her he was sorrowful that he had given her such bad news. “I think that could be very important.”

  “The coroner has already determined the bullet was shot at an upward angle,” she said.

  “I need something more precise than that,” Harold said carefully. “It could be the key to this.”

  “Yes,” Clara said, her words a croak. She cleared her throat. “Yes, I shall arrange that.”

  “And we must not forget the evidence of the dead bodyguard,” Tommy added. “That suggests an inside job.”

  “And why would anyone open a window in the middle of a shootout if they were not intending to fire a gun?” Harold suggested, hoping to lift the despondency his earlier words had created. “It seems an absurd thing to do. Our victim could see out of the window perfectly well as it was.”

  Those were all sound, rational arguments, but Brilliant Chang was neither sound nor rational when it came to his sister’s demise. Clara guessed she would have to take him up on his offer of speaking to Jao’s goons currently locked in police cells and the military barracks. Maybe Chang could persuade one of them to offer up a clue as to who wanted Jao dead. Clara thought it a flimsy lead, she suspected she would be lied to at every turn, but it would keep Chang busy while Tommy and Harold kept working on the bullet evidence.

  “There is still hope, Clara,” Tommy said gently.

  Clara pulled herself from her grim thoughts and managed to put a smile onto her lips.

  “Yes, we are not defeated yet.”

  They ate lunch in the morning room, with Annie only making the odd comment under her breath about her dining room being ill-used. Clara found her natural good humour returning as she pondered how Annie had come to consider the house her own, and the dining room her personal space. The house, after all, belonged to Tommy and Clara, and Tommy could use the dining room as he saw fit, yet they were all feeling as though they had imposed on Annie’s good graces.

  “Tortoises?” O’Harris had picked up the leaflet Clara had brought home from the petting zoo. “Are you getting another pet?”

  “It is a case I am working on. A tortoise has gone absent and the owner is quite worried. It might have been stolen.”

  “One of my great uncles had a pet Galapagos tortoise,” O’Harris said. “Auntie Flo told me about it once. Made a mess of the flowerbeds, apparently, and developed a disease of the shell that meant it lost its hardness.”

  “They need special care,” Clara recalled Mr Cobb’s words. “Many people do not realise that and through ignorance cause suffering.”

  “Ignorance is one of the greatest evils of this world,” O’Harris said solemnly. “When you think about it. All the wars and prejudices that have been the result of ignorance. Ignorance of other cultures, of other religions. Ignorance does more harm than hatred, if you ask me.”

  The atmosphere had once again become gloomy and Clara felt bad that their guest, Harold, had been brought into this morbid setting.

  Annie glanced around the luncheon party, casting them reproving looks.

  “Well, if I have ever known so many intelligent people so disposed to being foolishly stupid,” she declared loudly and with that tone she could carry off that reminded everyone of a stern nanny. “I assume that things are not going as you hoped with your cases. It happens, you should know that by now Clara, and you should also know that if you dig hard enough, you will find the truth and resolve any riddle.”

  “What if the truth could cause more harm than good?” Clara replied to Annie. “What if a policeman or a soldier really did shoot Jao? I do not blame them, of course, it was in the heat of the moment and she placed herself in that situation. She was wicked and dangerous. The trouble is, Chang is looking for someone to blame, he wants revenge. I am scared that revenge will fall on Park-Coombs.”

  “Firstly,” Annie said, her voice hard, “Chang needs to be reminded of just what his sister was doing and that she would gladly have seen him dead. Secondly, he only needs to know what you tell him. Supposing it was a policeman or soldier who shot her? Why should you tell him that?”

  “You mean, I should lie to him?” Clara asked, startled by the idea as much as anything because she had never considered it a real option. Oh, it had crossed her mind alright, but only in a fleeting fashion and she had dismissed it as being against her general principals.

  “The man is a crook,” Annie said stoutly. “And if it comes to a choice between telling the truth and saving Park-Coombs, which will you choose?”

  “If I were to cross that line,” Clara said, “if I was to become dishonest, wouldn’t I be disgracing my integrity as a detective?”

  “This is not about dishonesty,” Annie said firmly. “It is about tact. Sometimes, Clara, there is a right way and sometimes a right wrong way, the challenge is seeing the difference. If telling the truth places Park-Coombs in danger, how can that possibly be right?”

  Silence greeted this statement, but it was a thoughtful silence.

  “Life is more grey than b
lack and white,” Annie said, her tone quieter.

  Clara was letting this sink in, seeing the possibility, seeing a ray of hope. There could be a way out, even if the evidence they uncovered suggested the police were responsible for Jao’s death. Yet still Clara felt a pang of hesitation at the thought of lying, of going against her usually staunch dedication to the truth, however painful it might be.

  “We may still find the assassin among Jao’s men,” Tommy said. “We are not done with that yet.”

  “No,” Clara looked up and aimed to shed her dullness. She was not defeated yet. “There is much to uncover before we are done with that. But Annie has a point, and I shan’t forget it.”

  Annie smiled slightly, pleased with herself.

  “You get all sorts of nuggets of insight coming to you while you are making sandwiches,” she said. “Though that one I have been mulling over a while. You know, Clara, there is such a thing as being too honest for your own good.”

  Clara nearly laughed, but she bit her tongue. The statement had just seemed so much like something Chang would say, and the irony was not lost on her.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Having had her morale boosted by Annie, Clara decided it was time to take the bull by the horns and interview those who might know the truth about Jao’s death – the men in police custody. That meant contacting Chang, so he might help her. He had been right when he said the gang members would not talk to her; the chances were they would not speak freely to him, but then again, some might be hoping to restore themselves to Chang’s good graces.

  Clara telephoned the Royal Hotel and asked to speak to Mr Chang. There was a delay as he was summoned by a bellboy.

  “Yes?” Chang said gruffly down the phoneline.

  “Are you free to interview some criminals?” Clara asked him.