Harm’s Way

by Catherine Aird

  “You’ll be able to see which fields, of course,” said the farmer to Inspector Sloan, “that they would be.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the policeman. “Thank you.”

  That was a help. There were helicopters at the beck and call of the police force but they cost money. He made a mental note, all the same, that Hodge could have known where a body was for longer than anyone else.

  “Maize,” said Hodge. “It’s mostly maize, of course.”

  “And that was only sown last month,” pointed out George Mellot.

  Sloan made a note of that.

  “I don’t know why we’re bothering too much about walking over crops,” said Mellot with a touch of bitterness in his voice. “One of the footpaths goes right through the middle of the largest field on the farm.”

  “Maize and all?” asked Sloan.

  “Maize and all.” The farmer gave a short, mirthless laugh. “I can assure you that that won’t stop a dedicated walker like Gordon Briggs, Inspector. He’ll stick to his rights and lead his tribe right across the growing crop to prove it’s a right of way. That’s what they’ve come for, remember.”

  “Footpath Seventy-nine,” Sloan said. The Red Sea might have parted for Moses and the tribe of Israel: George Mellot’s maize wouldn’t give way for the walkers. They would trample right over it.

  “Pioneers, O pioneers,” said Mellot. Something of the church choir had stuck with him, too. “That’s what they think they are.”

  “One abreast, of course,” added Len Hodge. “They’re not supposed to walk more than one abreast across a field in crop, are they, Mr. Mellot?”

  “Huh!” said Mellot expressively, as the approaching walkers had come into view. “That’ll be the day, that will.”

  Now Sloan watched the Berebury Country Footpaths Society walk away in an untidy straggle towards the nearest fields. The waiting policemen went with them in a neat phalanx led by Detective Constable Crosby. Constable Mason had merged into the group but Len Hodge stood out as a big man even among policemen.

  “Start on Twenty Acre field first, Crosby,” said Sloan, “and then the one beyond.”

  “Old Tree,” Mellot informed him. “That’s what the other field is called.”

  Sloan nodded briefly, his mind on an old body.

  “There used to be one there—an old tree, I mean,” said Mellot, “in my grandfather’s day. It’s gone now.” He jerked his head. “They say that no family lasts longer than three oaks.”

  “All the fields here have names, I suppose, sir,” said Sloan. Detection in the country was certainly a different kettle of fish from detection in the town.

  “They do,” answered the farmer. “They’re all on the tithe map, of course, but they’re older than that—”

  They were interrupted by the distant sound of a siren. It had a galvanic effect on only one man. Leonard Hodge turned abruptly and ran at great speed back to the farm road. He flung himself into the driving seat of an old car already turned and facing the village, and set off with a screeching of tyres for Great Rooden.

  “A fire somewhere,” explained George Mellot calmly. “You’ll hear the engine in a minute. It doesn’t take them very long to turn out.”

  Sloan automatically took a look at his watch. He knew all about retained firemen in country areas far from full-time fire stations.

  “A barn would be burnt to the ground by the time the regular fire engine got out to us from Calleford,” said Mellot.

  Sloan nodded. “And the Great Rooden crew all come from the village?”

  “They do,” said Mellot. “They won the County Shield last year for efficiency.… Listen!” He cocked his head to one side. “I think I can hear them starting off.”

  True enough, within minutes the sound of a klaxon came over the morning air. Loud at first, the noise rapidly diminished and soon fell away into complete inaudibility.

  “They’ve gone the other way,” concluded Mellot. Sloan’s attention, though, had already gone back to the matter in hand. The searchers had fanned out across Twenty Acre and Old Tree fields, and begun their advance over the ground. They had their heads bent and eyes down as if in response to some invisible bingo caller. Detective Inspector Sloan and George Mellot walked over to them and brought up the rear.

  “No joy, sir,” reported Crosby at the end of their first sweep over the territory. “Where now?”

  Sloan pointed. “We’ll take those two over there next.”

  “Longacre.” The farmer supplied the field names. “And Kirby’s. Don’t ask me who Kirby was because I don’t know, Inspector.”

  The mists of antiquity weren’t Sloan’s concern. His mind was totally on the present. “Then we’ll take the orchards,” he said. “The grass is long enough under the trees to hide a dozen bodies.”

  Presently though the orchards, too, had been thoroughly searched without success. And the next pair of fields. And the next.

  “Nothing, sir,” reported Detective Constable Crosby.

  There were cows in the field after that. With feminine curiosity they approached the searchers, nuzzling their lunch-bags and staring wide-eyed as the policemen and walkers made their way purposefully across their field.

  It was obvious from the demeanour of the group that they had found nothing among the cows.

  “We’ll do the other side of the river next,” decided Sloan.

  A purposive sweep of the remaining fields of Pencombe Farm yielded no sign of a body. By half past twelve Crosby was reporting failure.

  “Not a thing, sir, anywhere.”

  “You’ve looked under the hedges?”

  “And in the ditches,” said Crosby stolidly.

  Sloan looked at the sketch map he had made with Constable Mason’s help.

  “It’s nearly half past twelve, sir,” said Crosby.

  “Where’s Mr. Briggs gone?” asked Sloan.

  “He’s just checking on a scarecrow.”

  “He would,” said Sloan.

  “A maukin, he called it.”

  “All right, then. Tell everyone to knock off now and be back here by two o’clock sharp. We’ll tackle Uppercombe after lunch and then Stanestede.”

  “I want,” said George Mellot loudly and clearly into the telephone, “to speak to Mr. Tom Mellot, please.”

  He was answered in a pronounced foreign accent. “I am the au pair,” said a girl’s voice.

  “I know,” said George Mellot patiently. “Can I speak to my brother, please?”

  “’E is not ’ere,” said the girl. “’E ’as gone away.”

  “Where is he then?”

  “’E ’as gone away,” said the voice again.

  “So you said.”

  “’E ’as gone away yesterday.”

  George Mellot ground his teeth. “What I want to know is where he is.”

  “I do not know where ’e is,” enunciated the voice in careful English.

  “Didn’t he leave an—”

  “Mr. Mellot and the señora and the leetle children all go away yesterday,” volunteered the voice.

  “Where did they go?” asked George Mellot.

  “In the car,” explained the voice helpfully. “And the dog also because I am no good for walking the dog.”

  George Mellot heroically refrained from direct comment. “When are they coming back?” he asked instead.

  The voice brightened. “When I see them.”

  “But—”

  “That is what the señora said,” insisted the au pair. “I remember she say exactly, to expect us when you see us.”

  Paul Hucham at Uppercombe Farm had a sheep in his arms when the search-party got to him immediately after they had eaten. His land climbed up out of the valley and was nearly all given over to sheep rearing. This, noted Detective Inspector Sloan, meant that all the grass was cropped short. Searching the ground therefore should be easier.

  “Where do you want to start, Inspector?” asked Hucham. He lowered the sheep into a foldgarth and
came forward to meet them.

  “From where your land meets Pencombe land,” said Sloan. His posse was methodically working outwards from where the finger had been found. If their search revealed nothing on Uppercombe Farm they would do the same eastwards at Stanestede and southwards at Lowercombe.

  “Right,” said Paul Hucham. “If you’ll all follow me then …”

  This time Detective Inspector Sloan perched on a stile to address his troops.

  “Keep going,” he exorted them. “It must be somewhere.”

  This, he thought, was true. The administrator of the Berebury District General Hospital had waxed eloquent on the subject of surgical waste the evening before. He had insisted to Sloan that the hospital’s disposal procedures were absolutely watertight. It hadn’t been the most appropriate simile but Sloan had got the message.

  The administrator had even quoted the hoary old advice churned out to generations of new house surgeons by the senior consultant when excising tissue at operation.

  He always, he said, told them to divide the tissue they had taken from the patient carefully into three.

  “Three?” Sloan had echoed, sounding like a comedian’s feed-man in spite of himself. Had it always been “Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full,” then?

  “A piece for the pathologist …”

  One for my master.

  “A piece for the coroner …”

  And one for my dame.

  “And a piece for the nurse to throw away.”

  But none for the little boy who cries in the lane.

  Sloan finished saying his own piece now to the assembled company and climbed down from the stile. Lunch-time spent at the Lamb and Flag had had a mellowing effect on the walkers. They were quite talkative now and noticeably more friendly to the policemen as they once more spread out over the fields.

  “I suppose,” said one of them (a “keep fit” fanatic if ever there was one), “that we’re doing the same amount of walking as usual.”

  “More,” said his companion morosely, “when you add up all the backwards and forwards. Like dogs,” he added.

  Paul Hucham kept with Sloan. “Inspector, there’s a little hollow in the hillside where the sheep always go for shelter. A man might have done the same thing.”

  “Right, sir, we’ll take a look at it, shall we?”

  “I can always tell when there’s a north-east wind blowing,” he said. “It’ll be full of sheep.”

  But there was nothing in Paul Hucham’s little hollow.

  “It was just a thought, Inspector,” he said as they surveyed the dip in the hillside. “A man might have taken shelter there too.”

  Sloan nodded. Watching animals made sense. They said that if a man wanted to survive in the jungle he should watch what the monkeys ate. And eat the same things.

  “It was worth checking, sir,” he said. In some matters Sloan was definitely on the side of the apes and not the angels.

  Paul Hucham frowned. “I can’t think of anywhere else at Uppercombe where a skeleton might be other than on open ground. There’s no shelter to speak of at all up here.”

  “We’ll find it, sir, never worry,” said Sloan. “Just give us time, that’s all. It’s not going to run away,” he added grimly. “That’s for sure.”

  “No,” said the farmer. He turned. “We’ll have to cut back this way, Inspector, because of the stream.”

  “Where does this one go? Down to the Westerbrook?” There was a narrow footpath running down beside the little stream.

  Hucham shook his head. “No. This flows down through Stanestede Farm. It gets bigger farther down the hill. It’s very important to the Ritchies there.”

  “They get their water from it, do they?” In the town water came in pipes but Sloan could quite see that matters might be different out here in the country.

  “Their electricity,” said Hucham. “They’ve got a generator just above the farm. That’s how they’re able to be all electric there without it costing them anything.”

  “Nice for them,” said Sloan, householder. “What about you?”

  “I have to make do with the view,” said Paul Hucham, waving an arm. “It’s not bad, is it?”

  “It’s very fine,” said Sloan.

  “On a clear day you can see Calleford.”

  Sloan nodded and turned to look back down at Pencombe Farm set at the bottom of the valley. Below them a determined search of Uppercombe Farm was being carried on. Once he caught the sound of Detective Constable Crosby’s voice borne upwards by the wind. Even at a distance he could pick out Gordon Briggs hurrying about as fussy as a sheep-dog. Over on his right the river Westerbrook glinted as the sun caught the moving water. He made a mental note to make sure that the banks of the river had been properly checked. Dr. Dabbe had mentioned that the finger had been somewhere where the damp could get at it, hadn’t he?

  “Plenty of crows up here, Inspector,” remarked Hucham presently.

  Sloan turned his attention to the sky. True enough, there were crows about. Their shiny black plumage was quite unmistakable. He looked at them keenly. Any one of them could have dropped the finger in front of the two walkers. And one of them, Sloan reminded himself, knew where the body of a man was to be found even if he, Sloan, didn’t.

  “Kaarh, kaarh, kaarh,” called a crow hoarsely.

  “It must be lonely for you up here, sir,” remarked Sloan.

  “The winter drags a bit,” admitted the sheep-farmer, “until the lambing starts. After that I’m too busy to notice.”

  “And then suddenly it’s spring, I suppose,” said Sloan absently. He could see that the latest cast by the search-party below had drawn a blank. Crosby was waving his arm and slowly all his helpers started to drift down the hillside again, this time in the direction of Stanestede Farm. Sloan turned to Paul Hucham. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Sorry you didn’t have any luck, Inspector.”

  “It’s not for want of trying,” said Sloan. He regarded the landscape laid out below him. “And somewhere down there is what we’re looking for.”

  “I’d rather someone else found it, all the same,” said the other man with a rueful half-laugh.

  “Yes, sir,” responded Sloan philosophically. There were some jobs that society was always content to have done for it by someone else. And the police force collected quite a lot of them.

  “It’s all very well when it’s only a sheep,” said Paul Hucham. “A human being is a different proposition altogether.”

  “That’s why we’re searching the land now,” said Sloan. It must have been quite a benchmark of civilisation when early man had begun to bury his dead. Now he came to think of it, the act of burial was one of the things which separated man from beast.

  “Of course,” said Hucham uneasily.

  “We couldn’t do nothing,” said Sloan as much to himself as to the farmer. “Not once we knew.” Except elephants. He was forgetting that they buried their fellow elephants when they died, too, didn’t they?

  “Of course not,” agreed the farmer hastily. “That wouldn’t do at all.”

  They had even, Sloan remembered, his thoughts running silently on, found time to bury that chap “whose corse to the rampart we hurried.” And that had been in the heat of battle. Sir John Moore after Corunna. Never mind that not a drum was heard, not a funeral note: that wasn’t what had been important. What had mattered was that the old warrior hadn’t been left lying around for the crows.

  Filled with new resolve Sloan turned and took his leave of the sheep-farmer.

  SIX

  A perfect end

  Mrs. Andrina Ritchie received the policemen and the walkers at Stanestede Farm. She was dressed for the town, not the country. And for Sunday, too.

  “You won’t mind if I don’t come with you, will you?” she said to Detective Constable Crosby, who had led the way there.

  “No, madam,” said that worthy with absolute truth. Well-dressed women frightened him. His gaze drifted involuntarily
down to her feet. In his opinion Mrs. Ritchie’s shoes came into the category of foot ornaments rather than useful articles. They would not have stood up to life on the farm for very long.

  “Go wherever you please,” she said, waving an arm to encompass the land. “It’s all the same to me.”

  “Thank you, madam.” Crosby cleared his throat: he had been instructed to ask an important question. “Do you keep pigs at Stanestede, by any chance?”

  “Pigs? Certainly not. Nasty, messy creatures.” She looked at him. “Why do you want to know that?”

  “Just checking, madam, that’s all.” The detective constable made a note in his book. Pigs were omnivorous. That, as Detective Inspector Sloan had carefully explained to him, meant that they ate everything.

  But everything.

  “We’ve only got cattle here,” she said.

  “I see,” said Crosby. Cattle were more selective. They didn’t eat everything.

  “They’re bad enough,” said Mrs. Ritchie.

  “I’m sure they are,” responded Constable Crosby, townee. Actually the police weren’t interested in cows, although he did not say so. What they were worried about was pigs. Eating people was wrong but pigs did not seem to know this. Cattle did.

  “Cows are always needing looking after,” she said resentfully, patting her hair with one hand. “I’m going to give them up now that I’m on my own and go over to sheep. They’re a lot less trouble.”

  “I’m sure that there’ll be changes at Stanestede,” murmured Crosby diplomatically.

  “You can bet your life there will,” she said, tightening her lips. “I like a weekend to be a weekend.”

  So did Crosby.

  “And with stock,” said Andrina Ritchie, “it isn’t.”

  “No, madam.” It wasn’t with crime either but he did not say so.

  “Now, Officer, what do you want from me?”

  “Did your husband—” Crosby stopped and started again. “Have you got a large scale map of the farm anywhere?”

  “In the office,” she said. “On the wall. This way.”

  She led Crosby through the house and into the kitchen. The farm office at Stanestede was in a little room off the kitchen, accessible from the out-of-doors as well. The constable stared at the kitchen. It couldn’t have been in greater contrast to the one at Pencombe Farm. Here there was no welcoming fire, no vast scrubbed elm table—just a formidable collection of electric machines arrayed in clinical grandeur amid a lot of colourful formica. The whole ensemble might have come from the pages of a women’s magazine. There was no touch of the country farmhouse kitchen about it at all.