Harm’s Way

by Catherine Aird

  “I call them men of straw,” remarked Leeyes.

  “But,” Sloan quoted his mentor in the City of London, “undisclosed holdings above a certain limit are not allowed.”

  “Sloan,” came the swift answer down the line, “I may have retained my youth but I have been a policeman long enough to know the difference between ‘not allowed’ and ‘not done.’”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So …”

  “So there comes a moment when the buyer has to make that disclosure.”

  “A law, is it, Sloan?”

  “A code, sir,” he said. Even lesser breeds without the law had codes of conduct. Sometimes, of course, codes worked better than laws. Sometimes they didn’t.

  “So that’s how this character Ivor Harbeton started to get his claws into Mellot’s Furnishings, is it?”

  “In a manner of speaking, sir.” Now he came to think about it, perhaps “raptor” was the right word. “He got his hands on just under thirty percent of the equity,” said Sloan, consulting his notebook.

  Leeyes grunted.

  “That’s near enough,” explained Sloan, “to the crucial figure for going into the market early one morning for the final killing which would have given Ivor Harbeton control.” When a bird of prey made its descent out of the sky down onto its victim it was called a stoop: even Sloan knew that.

  There was a short silence while Superintendent Leeyes digested this information. “That’s when he disappeared, I suppose.”

  “It is,” said Sloan. “And that’s not all, sir.”

  “No?”

  “In the beginning Mellot’s Furnishings wasn’t wholly owned by Tom Mellot and his wife,” said Sloan. “The man in the City had them look it up for me.”

  “Well?”

  “George Mellot and his wife put up half the original capital.”

  Leeyes grunted.

  Sloan pulled his notebook towards him. “I think we may find, sir, that Tom Mellot has a half share in Pencombe Farm.”

  “And I think,” said Superintendent Leeyes weightily, “that the sooner someone has a little chat with Mr. Tom Mellot the better.”

  THIRTEEN

  Stand in awe and sin not

  “Just one or two questions, madam, if you don’t mind.” Detective Constable Crosby slipped smoothly into his professional patter as soon as the door of Stanestede Farm was opened to him. “May I come in?”

  Mrs. Andrina Ritchie was obviously less used to the interview routine and visibly braced herself. “Of course …”

  “It would help a lot if we could trace your husband.” He coughed. “In the circumstances, if you take my meaning.”

  She nodded. “I have heard about—about Pencombe.”

  “The easiest way to trace a man,” said Crosby, “is usually through his car.”

  “His car’s here,” she said slowly. “In the garage.”

  “But—”

  “It was found at Calleford Market the next day. The day after he’d gone, I mean.” She gave him a brittle look. “The auctioneers rang up and said they’d noticed it was still at the market and was there anything wrong.”

  “So you went in and collected it?”

  “George Mellot very kindly ran me over to Calleford.”

  “The keys?”

  “Under the mat of the driver’s seat where we always left them.”

  Crosby shook his head sorrowfully at the monumental folly of this practice. “Were you surprised about the car still being there?”

  “Less surprised than I would have been,” she admitted frankly, “if our solicitor hadn’t telephoned me before the auctioneers did.”

  “Oh?”

  “It was old Mr. Puckle from Puckle, Puckle and Nunnery. He told me he had had a telephone call from Martin that morning.”

  “The Friday?”

  “That’s right. Mr. Puckle had been in court but Martin had left a message with his secretary to say he was walking away from his old life completely and would Mr. Puckle see to everything.”

  Crosby wrote that down.

  “More like walking away from his old wife,” she said bitterly.

  Crosby said nothing.

  “You can’t just slough off the past like a snake shedding its skin,” she said with anguish. “Can you?”

  “No, madam.” A lot of people, though, thought that you could—until, that is, they tried it and found that you couldn’t. Crosby knew that. Like Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress you took your scars with you. And kept them until the end of life.

  “Mr. Puckle said to carry on as usual for the time being.” She snorted gently. “As usual!”

  “Yes, madam.” Solicitors didn’t like action. Crosby knew that, too. The only matter that stirred them into speedy action that Crosby knew about was the making of a will. They came round pretty quickly if you wanted to write a new will. “So …”

  “So that’s what I’ve been doing.” She twisted her hands together. “It hasn’t been easy, I can tell you.”

  “No, madam.” The constable cleared his throat preparatory to speech. There was one question that was always more delicate than the rest. “What are you doing about money?” he asked.

  “We had a joint account,” she answered tonelessly.

  Sauce for the goose and sauce for the gander, was what Crosby called those. “And has it been used by your husband?” he asked curiously.

  She shook her head. “Not since the beginning of June. That’s the funny thing. I asked the bank especially.” Her lips tightened. “I thought he would have emptied it, you see. It would have been just like him.”

  “But he hadn’t?”

  “He hasn’t touched a penny,” she said.

  Mate and checkmate.

  “Perhaps Beverley whoever she is can afford to keep him in the style to which he would like to be accustomed,” she said.

  Or cheque-mate.

  “But the farm—” began Crosby aloud.

  “That’s a proper partnership,” she said. “It’s in both our names. All signed and sealed and everything.”

  So was marriage, but Crosby didn’t say so.

  “We were in Stanestede together,” she said, “as joint owners, each with power to act. That was in case anything happened. That’s why Mr. Puckle told me to do nothing and to carry on on my own. He said Martin might come back and then …” her voice trailed away disconsolately.

  “It would help us if he did,” said the constable truthfully. Crosby wasn’t sure how Andrina Ritchie would feel about this in the long run but the police would be very glad indeed if he did. His mind was on a skeleton at Pencombe and narrowing the field always helped. “There’s just one more thing, madam.”

  “Yes?” she said. Detective Constable Crosby noticed the almost subconscious squaring of Andrina Ritchie’s shoulders as she spoke to him.

  “How tall is your husband?” The shoulders slackened. It wasn’t the question she had been expecting, he was sure about that.

  She frowned. “Isn’t it silly?” she said. “I’m not sure. He was about five foot eight or nine, I suppose.”

  Crosby wrote that down. “I expect he took his passport with him.” A new life might well begin in another country; it wouldn’t be the first time that had happened.

  “Passport!” she echoed with contumely. “Martin hadn’t got a passport. You don’t travel if you’re tied to a farm.”

  “No, I suppose you don’t.” Crosby could see this. A passport, though, would have Martin Ritchie’s exact height on it and Dr. Dabbe would tell them the height of the dead man. And if two and two made four …

  “A farm is a millstone round your neck,” she said.

  “I can see that it might be.”

  “All the time.”

  “Yes, madam.” Crosby knew the formula for calculating height from a thigh-bone now. He wondered if there was one for doing the same thing from a pair of trousers. Or if you used the same formula. Cuff to ankle might give you height, too, if you
had the ankle, that is.…

  “You can’t escape from a farm,” said Andrina Ritchie.

  “Could I see some of his clothes, please?” There was a code that men’s outfitters used for selling off-the-peg suits that might help too. The only letters of it that Crosby knew, though, were S.P. and they stood for short and portly. He didn’t know any short and portly farmers.

  She led the way to a bedroom furnished almost entirely in white and opened the doors of a wardrobe that extended all the way along one wall. “Martin’s things are at this end.”

  Detective Constable Crosby picked out a dark suit.

  “His best,” she said promptly. “His ‘Sunday-go-meeting’ suit, he called it.” Her lips twisted. “His ‘Thursday-go-meeting-Beverley’ suit was more free and easy.”

  Martin Ritchie wasn’t short and portly. Crosby could tell that at once. If his suit was anything to go by he was a well-built medium man. “A photograph might help us trace him,” said Crosby.

  Andrina Ritchie moved to a drawer and pulled out an album. “Take your pick,” she said savagely. “I shan’t be wanting them any more.”

  Crosby tucked the album under his arm. “What colour is his hair?”

  “Light ginger,” said Andrina Ritchie, “and if it’s any help he had freckles.”

  “It is a help,” responded Crosby gravely.

  “More in summer than in winter, of course.”

  “Naturally, madam.” He fingered his notebook. “Is there anything else that would help us to build up a picture of him?”

  “He didn’t have any distinguishing marks, if that’s what you mean.” She examined her own manicured fingernails with studied interest.

  Crosby kept silent. The heap of bones that had been on the barn roof had gone a long way past distinguishing marks.

  “Except an appendix scar,” she volunteered. “He had that.”

  “Nothing—er—deeper?” Crosby hunted about in his mind for a more graphic way of putting what he wanted to say and couldn’t find it.

  Mrs. Ritchie frowned. “I think he broke a rib once. There was some trouble once with a bull.”

  Crosby didn’t know if that would still show or not. Dr. Dabbe would find it if it did. Another thought came to him. Diamonds were forever but gold lasted well too. “His teeth,” he said.

  “What about them?” asked Andrina Ritchie, raising a pair of finely plucked eyebrows into an arch.

  “Were they all there, for instance?”

  “He had a crown on one front one that he’d had knocked out.”

  “Another bull?”

  “A hockey match,” she said distastefully.

  “Ah.”

  “A mixed hockey match,” she added with dryness.

  “Heroes’ hockey,” pronounced Crosby. “That’s what that’s called.”

  “And he had a bit of a gap on one side at the back. That’s all.”

  “It may be enough,” said Crosby, shutting his notebook and picking up Martin Ritchie’s best suit. “You never know, do you, madam?”

  The detective who went round to call on Tom Mellot’s family home in a rather nice cul-de-sac in a pleasant part of London was something of a linguist. He was also both young and personable. He had in fact been hand-picked for the job: Detective Inspector Sloan had asked the Metropolitan Police to send the best Spanish-speaking range-finder they had. Kitchen range-finder, that is. He had gone to the Mellots’ in response to an urgent message from the Calleshire County Constabulary.

  “Buenos días, señorita.” He had begun on exactly the right note with the au pair girl who had answered the door and within minutes he was established where he wanted to be—on a chair drawn up to the kitchen table, a dish of tapas in front of him.

  Teresita Losada pulled up the chair opposite to his and expanded in Spanish in a way that would have astonished her employers, who had found her uncommunicative and inclined to fall into peninsular—if not positively oriental—reveries. Warnings about talking to strangers uttered by Mrs. Tom Mellot did not extend in Teresita’s mind to handsome young men familiar with the argot of Cartagena. Even the mandatory mention of the dreaded word “police” by the young man did not upset her. In her way of thinking there was absolutely no connection between this agreeable listener and the Guardia Civil, still less with the Policía Armada y de Tráfico. Besides, were not the British police wonderful? Everyone said so.

  “Muchas gracias,” said the detective with the good manners to the offer of the bowl of tapas. Teresita Losada was too young and innocent to have encountered the Cuerpo General de Policía—the plain-clothes Criminal Investigation Branch of the Spanish Police. The detective quickly found out, as George Mellot had done before him, that the au pair did not know where Tom Mellot and his wife and family were.

  “They are away,” said Teresita vaguely. “They will come back.”

  “Naturally,” said the young detective in his best Spanish. “I understand. ‘Le weekend.’” Too late he remembered that this was predominantly a French expression but the girl did not seem to have noticed. He steered the conversation gently away from the difficulties of getting really good olive oil in this part of London—first pressing, naturally—and instead talked about the firm of Mellot’s Furnishings Ltd. and what had happened to them last May.

  “Esa empresa!” exclaimed Teresita dramatically, throwing up her hands.

  “Tell me,” said the detective.

  “What a time we had,” she said impressively. “You would not believe it.”

  “No?”

  “Always the telephone. Morning, noon and night, it rings.”

  “Ah …”

  “And men always talking, talking, talking.”

  The man from the police made sympathetic noises but did not say much.

  “And me,” she said, “me, I have to look after the children all of that time because everyone is so busy.” She pouted. “To keep them from being under the feet.”

  “You must have been very busy,” said the other diplomatically. “What was all the fuss about? Did you know?”

  “Business,” said Teresita dismissively. Women’s lib was not as far along the road in Spain as it was in Great Britain. It had got nowhere at all in Teresita’s village. “Men’s work.” She nodded in a way that would have disappointed not a few feminists.

  The personable young detective nodded encouragingly.

  “Mrs. Mellot she did try to explain it to me one day.” The girl got up from the table to give a stir to a dish of paella on the stove.

  “Ah …”

  “But I did not understand,” she said. The great thing about the British way of life that Teresita Losada had grasped was that duennas had no place in it. Nothing else was really important to her.

  “I see.” The accommodating young man contrived to sound sympathetic.

  She frowned. “I think it was that someone wanted to take their enterprise from them and they did not want that.” In Spain, too, having and holding went together.

  “Naturally, señorita,” said the young man fluently, “no one enjoys losing what is theirs.” Every policeman found that out very early on in his career. He slid a photograph of Ivor Harbeton onto the table. It was a press photograph and not a very good one at that—he was certainly no hidalgo—but Ivor Harbeton had been divorced not once but three times and there was no one on hand to supply a better one. His last known address was an expensive service flat. Nothing remained there to show who its last occupant had been. “Tell me, did this man ever come to this house?”

  Teresita Losada peered at the picture and nodded. “Yes, he came here. I saw him.”

  “Many times?”

  She shook her head. “Once only.” She set a plate of paella in front of the policeman.

  “When? Can you remember?”

  She searched for the right words. “Just before the end of the busy time.”

  “Did you have to take the children out when he came?” he asked indistinctly between mouthfuls of
paella.

  Her brow puckered. “The children were in bed.”

  “He came late at night then?”

  She looked blank. “Not particularly.”

  The detective metaphorically kicked himself. He should have remembered that to a nation that starts its evening meal after ten o’clock no such time as “late at night” exists.

  “I remember,” said Teresita, “because I had to take the dog out.”

  “I see.” The paella was good.

  “I do not like taking the dog out.”

  “No?”

  “The dog does not like me.” This was Teresita’s only failing in an alien land. The judgement of a small white Sealyham terrier was not wrong either. Her employers had found her kind to children but not to animals.

  The detective got back to the matter at hand. He tapped the photograph of Harbeton. “How long did this man stay here?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Who can say?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I did not see him leave.”

  “He had gone by the time you got back to the house?”

  She opened her hands wide. “I do not know. Mrs. Mellot told me when I came in that it was time for bed.”

  “His car?” said the detective immediately. “Was that still standing outside when you came back with the dog?”

  “There was no car,” she said. “He came by taxi nearly.”

  “Nearly?” For a moment the young man thought he had lost an idiom somewhere.

  “I saw him come,” she said simply. “He got out of the taxi at the end of the road and walked the rest of the way. He came nearly.”

  The detective nodded, satisfied. Ivor Harbeton had come to see Tom Mellot for a secret meeting then, between principals, advisers out of the way, tell-tale company cars left in the garage. Business battles usually came down to this in the end—an eyeball-to-eyeball with seconds out of the ring. It wasn’t so far removed from a medieval tournament and knights jousting after all.

  He finished his paella before he brought the conversation round to Ivor Harbeton again: and he did that casually. “You don’t remember which day of the week it was, do you?”

  She didn’t but he didn’t mind. In fact he executed a little passacaglia all by himself as he went down the garden path and said “Olé” under his breath when he finished his report.