Harm’s Way

by Catherine Aird

  “Sure.” Len Hodge lifted his end with consummate ease. “Where do you want it?”

  “We’ll try the shed first.”

  Hodge obligingly propped the ladder up against the shed wall. Sloan shinnied up it, conscious of George Mellot’s motionless figure on the back doorstep. One quick glance from the right level assured him that there was nothing lying in between the ridges of the roof of the shed. He descended and looked round the farmyard.

  “Now the barn, please,” said Sloan quietly.

  Hodge helped him to carry the ladder back across the farmyard. George Mellot still hadn’t moved but out of the corner of his eye Sloan saw Meg Mellot had come forward to the kitchen window. Her white, anxious face was right up against the pane as she watched his every move.

  “I want the ladder against the gulley,” Sloan said to Hodge, who obediently swung it up without apparent effort and then stood well back in a detached way as if to disassociate himself from the action.

  The moment before Sloan set foot on the bottom rung of the ladder remained one etched on his mind as a frozen section of time. There were all the elements of a tableau vivant about it—an exhibition of individuals placing themselves in striking attitudes so as to imitate statues. In fact it was the immobility of those watching him that struck Sloan most forcibly. It was as if all three had been fashioned from alabaster.

  It was a higher climb to the top of the precast-concrete barn than it had been to the shed roof. When his eyes drew level with the roof-line Detective Inspector Sloan looked along the gutter which lay between the two ridges of the roof.

  This time there was something there to see.

  EIGHT

  Lighten our darkness

  “And about time, too, Sloan,” trumpeted Superintendent Leeyes churlishly down the telephone. “You’ve had all day.”

  “Yes, sir.” This was undeniable.

  “Well? Go on, man.…”

  “There are more human remains lying on the roof of the barn here at Pencombe Farm,” reported Sloan with concision. He was standing in George Mellot’s office where the window—like that of the kitchen—gave out onto the farmyard. Detective Constable Crosby was standing on guard at the bottom of the ladder that still stood against the side of the barn but no one was showing the least inclination to go up it.

  Superintendent Leeyes grunted.

  “It—the skeleton, that is,” carried on Sloan, “is lying between the two ridges of the barn roof.” There was probably a technical term for the gulley at the bottom of the two slopes—more of a gutter, really—but Sloan did not know what it was. “There’s a sort of drain there but it’s not quite blocking it.”

  “That accounts for the damp, I suppose,” growled Leeyes. “Dr. Dabbe said he thought the finger had come from somewhere damp, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Sloan, adding, “The doctor’s on his way over here now.” He paused and then went on significantly, “And so are Dyson and Williams.”

  Dyson and Williams were the Calleshire force’s police photographers.

  “Oh, they are, are they?” commented Leeyes trenchantly.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That means,” said Leeyes heavily, “that you’ve found something more than bones, doesn’t it, Sloan?”

  “It’s more of a case, sir,” said the detective inspector, “of not finding something.”

  Leeyes grunted again. “Like what?”

  “There is most of the rest of a human skeleton up there,” said Sloan, choosing his words with care.

  “Most?” queried Leeyes sharply. “What do you mean?”

  “Not all of it.”

  “Hrrmph,” said Leeyes. “So the crows have had a bit more than fingers, have they, then?”

  “It’s not that, sir,” replied Sloan.

  “Well,” demanded Leeyes peremptorily, “what is it then?”

  “There are other fingers missing, too, of course,” prevaricated Sloan.

  “Naturally,” said Leeyes, “but—”

  “But,” he said apologetically, “I’m afraid the head’s not there either.”

  “What!” exploded Superintendent Leeyes down the telephone.

  “It’s gone,” said Sloan simply.

  “But—”

  “There’s no head there, sir,” Strictly speaking, he supposed, he should have used the word “skull.”

  “A crow,” pronounced Leeyes weightily, “couldn’t have taken the head away.”

  “No, sir.” That much was self-evident.

  “So, Sloan, either someone’s been up there since for it—”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Or,” concluded Leeyes flatly, “we’re dealing with someone who put a headless corpse up there.”

  “Exactly, sir.”

  “You know what that means, Sloan, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “Murder.”

  “In either case,” said Leeyes.

  “Almost certainly,” agreed Sloan.

  “Why has the head gone?” asked Leeyes after a pause for consideration. “Do you know that, Sloan?”

  “There are two reasons that I can think of, sir.” It had been the question that had dominated Sloan’s own thoughts as he had slowly climbed down the ladder and gone indoors to the telephone.

  “Go on.”

  “Either it reveals the cause of death—”

  “A bullet would tell us quite a lot,” mused Leeyes, “wouldn’t it?”

  “It would, sir.”

  “Ballistics have come on a lot since I was on the beat.”

  Sloan coughed. “Even a fractured skull would put us in the picture a bit more.”

  “Hankering after our old friend the blunt instrument, are you, eh, Sloan?”

  “Perhaps, sir.” Something had killed whoever it was who was lying up there. There was at least no doubt about that. He paused and then said, “There’s another reason, though, why the head might have gone, sir.”

  “Well?”

  “A head will most likely have had teeth in it,” said Sloan succinctly. Forensic odontology had come on quite as much as the science of ballistics.

  “Identification.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Sloan, clearing his throat. “It’s going to be quite a problem.”

  Leeyes grunted. “There must be clues now you’ve got something to go on.”

  “As far as I can make out,” rejoined Sloan obliquely, “there were no clothes up there with the bones either.”

  “Naked and dead?” said Leeyes lugubriously.

  “Just so, sir.”

  The superintendent suddenly became very brisk. “Keep me in the picture, Sloan, won’t you? This is all very interesting.”

  “This is all very interesting, Sloan,” echoed Dr. Dabbe not very long afterwards. He, too, had now climbed to the top of the ladder propped up against the barn and looked along the roof.

  “Yes, Doctor,” replied Sloan. Like the superintendent, Dr. Dabbe was able to take a detached view. Sloan couldn’t.

  “Not so much a body as disjecta membra,” observed the pathologist.

  “Enough for a proper inquest, though?” enquired Sloan. He didn’t know what disjecta membra were.

  “Lord bless you, yes.”

  “That’s something,” said Sloan. Invoking the due processes of the law relating to the dead with only a finger to show had a faintly Gilbertian ring about it.

  “I’ll need a much closer look, of course,” said Dr. Dabbe.

  “I’m having a scaffolding platform brought out from Berebury.” It had only just struck Sloan as odd that the name of the scene of the direct penalty that the law could exact had declined into a mere builders’ aid.

  “You’ll have noticed, Sloan, that the body up there lacks the Yorick touch.”

  “The head’s not there,” agreed Sloan more prosaically.

  “Alas, poor Yorick,” said Dr. Dabbe breezily. “I wonder where it’s got to.”

  “So do I,” said Sloan feelingl
y.

  “I’m not promising anything, mind you, Sloan, but with a closer look at the body I might be able to tell you at what stage the head came off.”

  “That would help,” said Sloan moderately.

  “And how it came off.”

  “So would that,” said Sloan.

  “Haven’t seen a true decapitation in years,” mused the pathologist.

  Detective Inspector Sloan had never seen one. He resolved to be more grateful for small mercies in future.

  “Pity’s the head’s gone, all the same,” said Dr. Dabbe regretfully. “So few people are completely edentulous these days that you could have counted on there being teeth.”

  “Heads are useful,” agreed Sloan gravely.

  “And should be kept,” said the pathologist. “Especially when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” He jerked his head. “You know your Kipling, I take it, Sloan?”

  “Yes, Doctor.” Now there was a poet that man and boy—and policeman—could understand, though there were those who reckoned that his poem “If” had done them more harm than good. Unrealistic goals led a man to think less of himself when he didn’t reach them, that’s what the psychologists said when they went on about under- and overachievers. The empire builders, of course, hadn’t concerned themselves with the nonachievers—hadn’t considered failure as a tenable proposition.…

  “There’s something else that it appears not to have got,” observed Dr. Dabbe colloquially.

  It was another poem that came into Sloan’s mind then. It was called “The Naming of Parts.” Rudyard Kipling hadn’t lived to write about that war: the war in which they had the naming of parts. It had been Henry Reed who had caught the flavour of those later times with what a man did not have.

  “Yes, Doctor,” he said aloud, coming back to the present. “I know.”

  “Like the Emperor,” said the pathologist jovially, “it hasn’t got any clothes. Did you notice that, Sloan?”

  “I did.” Sloan didn’t know about emperors. He did know about detection. “It’s going to make identification even more difficult,” he said.

  “It is,” agreed the pathologist, rubbing his chin. “On the other hand, Sloan, it did make something else a great deal easier.”

  Sloan looked up curiously. “What was that?”

  Dabbe grinned. “The Little Red Riding Hood touch.”

  “Pardon, Doctor?”

  “All the better to be eaten by crows, Sloan, that’s what.”

  Sloan nodded his comprehension and tightened his lips. It wasn’t a happy thought that someone had worked this out. There was a calculation about this crime that betokened a really determined mind scheming away.

  “A proper invitation to corvus corone Linn to dine is having no clothes,” remarked Dr. Dabbe thoughtfully.

  “There’s nothing,” said Sloan, waving a hand in the direction of the barn roof, “at all accidental about any of this.”

  “On the contrary,” agreed the pathologist briskly. “Naked, headless corpses do not in my experience often get themselves onto the roofs of barns.”

  “And as hiding-places go,” observed Sloan judiciously, “it is difficult to think of a better one.”

  “A grave always shows,” pronounced the pathologist.

  “He might not have been found,” said Sloan, “for years and years.” He knew there were mathematical formulae where time and distance were locked together. No one had yet put a name or symbol to the ratio, but time and crime were inextricably interwoven, too. The importance of justice seemed to vary in inverse proportion to the distance of the crime from the time it was brought to book.

  There was a subject for study by someone clever, if you like. Sloan had noticed before now that the punishment of an old crime had none of the passion attached to the solving of a new one, fresh in the collective consciousness. An earlier generation of crime-prevention officers had even used the expression “hot pursuit” for newly committed crime with a special meaning all of its own.

  “He might not have been found,” nodded Dabbe, “except for a crow and a finger.”

  “Quite so, Doctor.” But for a nail a battle had been lost, hadn’t it?

  “The rest of him mightn’t have been noticed for a long time,” said Dabbe, giving the barn a critical look. “This building is almost new. It wouldn’t have wanted maintenance or painting for years.”

  Even barns that did need maintenance didn’t get it from a lot of the farmers that Sloan knew.

  “I reckon, Sloan,” continued the pathologist cheerfully, “that you’re dealing with someone who had very nearly solved the eternal problem of all murderers—the disposal of the victim.”

  “That’s a great comfort, that is,” said Sloan bitterly. It was all very well for Dr. Dabbe to be looking on the bright side. All he had to deal with was the body and the court. He, Sloan, had to tangle with real live villains as well. And clever ones at that, it seemed.

  “There’s another nice touch about the barn roof as a hiding-place as well,” went on Dr. Dabbe, unperturbed.

  “What’s that?” asked Sloan. It had taken more than brains to think of the barn roof. It had taken imagination too. They were a dangerous combination.

  “Sometimes with murder,” said the pathologist, “time is of the essence.”

  “Popping him up there wouldn’t have taken all that long,” agreed Sloan thoughtfully.

  “Although it would have been a bit of a struggle.” Dr. Dabbe stroked his chin. “I’ll be able to tell you presently if the deceased was a big man.”

  “However difficult it was to get him up there,” rejoined Sloan energetically, “I’ll bet it was easier than burying a body in a hurry.”

  “In some ways, Sloan, it was better, too.”

  “Better?”

  “For the murderer.”

  “Ah.” It was as well to know whose outlook you were considering.

  “I don’t know if you’ve ever tried it, Sloan, but six feet of earth takes a fair bit of digging.”

  “Yes, Doctor, I know.” The growing of roses called for quite a lot of spadework.

  The doctor raised his nose in the air for all the world like a pointer scenting something. “And one usual objection doesn’t apply here.”

  “What’s that, doctor?”

  “Mephitis.”

  Sloan hunched his shoulders. There was a medical word whose meaning he did remember. “The smell of the dead,” he said.

  “If there had been one,” said the pathologist, “and there would, nobody would have noticed it here in the middle of a farmyard.”

  “True.” Some person or persons unknown had clearly been very clever indeed, he decided.

  “Anyway, Sloan, burial doesn’t offer everything.”

  “No, Doctor?” Whose point of view was the doctor speaking from now?

  “Sometimes,” murmured Dr. Dabbe reflectively, “burial preserves.”

  “The Pharaohs, you mean?”

  “Not them.” The pathologist dismissed the surviving remains of the representatives of several ancient Egyptian dynasties with the wave of a hand. “They were different.”

  “Ah.”

  “But with inhumation burial,” said Dr. Dabbe more expansively, “you sometimes get adipocere tissue and so forth.”

  Tissue of any sort was something else they had not got, thought Sloan. In quantity, anyway. He wasn’t sure yet how much they did have and wasn’t looking forward to finding out.

  “Adipocere tissue can help,” said Dr. Dabbe.

  “I’m sure it can,” said Sloan warmly. There was no doubt whose side the doctor was speaking for now.

  “With burial, of course,” said the doctor, “you have less chance of concealing identity.”

  “And of removing clues to the cause of death,” said Sloan sombrely.

  “That, too,” agreed the pathologist. “As soon as this scaffolding tower that you’ve promised arrives, and you let the dog get a proper look at the rabbit
, Sloan, I’ll tackle your two problems for you.”

  “Two?” echoed Sloan. He didn’t know how on earth the doctor had managed to reduce his problems to only two.

  “Identity and cause of death,” said Dr. Dabbe neatly. “Those are the things you want to know, Sloan, aren’t they?”

  “You won’t be wanting us any more today, Inspector, will you?” The leader of the Berebury Country Footpaths Society stood squarely in front of Detective Inspector Sloan, knapsack in hand.

  “I suppose not, Mr. Briggs,” he replied.

  The whole atmosphere in the farm kitchen at Pencombe had been changed by the finding of the skeleton. Talk had dried to a trickle and the faintly convivial mood associated with tea-time after a day’s walking in the open air had evaporated. It had been succeeded by one of strain and slightly forced conversational exchanges. As if by common consent not one of these present was anywhere near the window which looked out onto the farmyard. Wendy Lamport, standing at the sink and washing up as if her life depended on it, resolutely kept her head down. Mrs. Mellot, concerned and flustered, was drying up cups and saucers at speed.

  “We can be going then,” said Briggs.

  Sloan nodded.

  “Now that you’ve found what you were looking for.”

  “Yes,” said Sloan.

  “And we can’t do anything more for you anyway, can we?” Gordon Briggs still made no move to go.

  “Not at this stage,” said Sloan.

  Briggs looked up sharply. “What do you mean?”

  “There’ll be an inquest,” said Sloan. “You’ll be wanted then.”

  “Of course,” said Briggs quickly.

  “That’ll come later.” An inquest opened and adjourned would be all that the police could ask for from Her Majesty’s Coroner for the County of Calleshire. “You’ll be told when and where—”

  They were interrupted by the sound of breaking china.

  A cup had slipped from Meg Mellot’s fingers and lay smashed and broken into a dozen pieces on the floor.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said rather breathlessly into the silence which the sudden noise had brought about. “It doesn’t matter at all. I’ll get a dustpan and brush.”

  As abruptly as it had begun the silence ended: all at once everyone started talking again.