“Tomorrow,” Teresita Losada had said hopefully, “I make fabada.”
Detective Inspector Sloan regarded the suit which Crosby had brought back from Stanestede Farm for a long moment and then said confidently, “Ernest Grimshaw will know.” He looked up. “What time is it, Crosby?”
“Half past eight, sir.”
“Couldn’t be better,” said Sloan briskly. “He’ll be back from chapel by now. The car, Crosby. You can take me there straightaway.”
“Take you where, sir?”
“Postlethwaite and Grimshaw’s in the High Street.”
“That crummy outfit?”
“Outfitters, Crosby,” Sloan corrected him gently. “Gents’ outfitters, to be precise.”
“They’re still crummy.”
“Old-fashioned,” said Sloan. But that was an understatement and Sloan knew it. The firm of Postlethwaite and Grimshaw was among the oldest in Berebury and very proud of the fact. The last Postlethwaite had died in the Old Queen’s time—they had put up black mourning-boards over the shop-windows on the day of the funeral naturally—but there were still Grimshaws in the business.
“They won’t be open on a Sunday evening,” objected Crosby.
“Ernest Grimshaw,” said Sloan impressively, “is probably the only man who actually still lives in the High Street.”
“Over the shop?” said Crosby.
“His grandfather slept under the counter,” said Sloan. “Come on, Crosby, and bring that suit with you.”
What he did not tell Crosby was that he knew the shop well. It was in Postlethwaite and Grimshaw’s shop that he, Christopher Dennis Sloan, had had his first pair of long trousers bought for him. In Sloan’s childhood “going into longs” had almost had the quality of a rite of passage. As the police car swept down the Sabbath-deserted High Street he wondered what symbolic rite among growing boys had succeeded it to make the transition stage between boyhood and youth manifest to the world.
Mr. Ernest Grimshaw’s first reaction on seeing Martin Ritchie’s suit was to feel the material between his fingers. “Nothing wrong with this cloth, Inspector. Run-of-the-mill, of course, but nearly everything is these days, more’s the pity.”
“It’s not the cloth that we’ve come about, Mr. Grimshaw.” Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby had interrupted a Sunday-evening-after-chapel cold supper of veal and ham pie that was in its way as ritual as any feast in the church’s calendar.
“Mass-produced, of course,” said the shopkeeper, turning the jacket over in his hands. “There’s not a lot of bespoke tailoring about any more.” Old Mr. Grimshaw’s energies were engaged in fighting a rearguard action against the multiple retail stores. Postlethwaite and Grimshaw’s premises occupied a prime site in the High Street and Ernest Grimshaw knew it. Young Mr. Grimshaw’s attentions centred largely on trying to bring the firm into the second half of the twentieth century. He was doomed to failure in this: his father had been the last man in Berebury to stop wearing spats. “Or good cloth, either,” continued Ernest Grimshaw, who continually lamented the passing of palmier days. “You don’t see as much worsted about as you used to, more’s the pity.”
“Things aren’t what they were,” said Sloan generally. He had found that this remark usually evoked ready sympathy with anyone on the graveyard side of sixty. It should go down well with the owner of the last emporium in the town to have had an overhead cash railway. Sloan could still remember the fascination with which he had watched the little brass cylinder with his mother’s money in it travel to the lady cashier in her perch in the middle of the shop and back with the receipt and the change. The policeman in him now knew how vulnerable the cashier had been. The little boy in him still saw the mechanism as something that the wonders of the space age had not diminished.
“Near the top of the range, of course,” said Mr. Grimshaw, looking over the whole of Martin Ritchie’s outfit with a professional eye, “but not quite at the top.”
“What we wanted to know,” said Sloan, “was whether you could tell us how tall the man who wore it was.”
Mr. Grimshaw dropped the suit back onto the table rather quickly.
“A little matter,” explained Sloan, “of our having the suit on the one hand and some human remains on the other.”
“Quite, quite,” said Mr. Grimshaw hurriedly. “I thought there would be—ah—a reason. It being—ah—Sunday evening and so forth. How tall, did you say?”
“I wouldn’t have been seen dead in it myself,” remarked Crosby chattily.
Mr. Grimshaw had already taken a quick look at what the detective constable was wearing and averted his eyes.
“How tall,” concurred Sloan pacifically.
“Let me have a look at the trousers then.” Mr. Grimshaw felt about round his own lapels for the tape measure which lived over his shoulders from Monday morning to Saturday evening. When his hands came back empty he looked at them in some surprise. “Where did I put my inch tape?” he murmured.
“The inside trouser leg measures thirty inches,” supplied Crosby.
“Then the wearer will have been between five foot eight and five foot nine tall,” pronounced Mr. Grimshaw promptly. He looked up. “Is that what you wanted to know, Inspector?”
“It is a fact,” temporised Sloan, “and facts are always helpful in our work, Mr. Grimshaw.” Who was it who had said that there were no problems, only missing data? At least Martin Ritchie’s height was a little less missing data.
“That’s off the cuff, of course, Inspector,” said the outfitter.
“Naturally,” said Sloan. It was every man to his own metaphor. He picked up the trousers.
“They would fit our body,” remarked Crosby less discreetly.
Mention of the word “body” aroused Mr. Grimshaw’s professional memory. “We used to do a steady trade in white silk stockings for laying out,” he said, shaking his head sadly, “but there’s no call for them any more.”
“You wouldn’t be seen dead in them either, Crosby, I suppose,” said Sloan sourly. He thanked Mr. Grimshaw and reached for Martin Ritchie’s coat and trousers. “Come on. We’ve still got work to do.”
FOURTEEN
The grave to be a bed of hope
The primitive instinct to congregate can be observed in almost all animal species, not least the human variety. Sociologists have noted that this herd instinct is powerfully reinforced by exciting news of any description but the more especially by bad news. The inhabitants of the village of Great Rooden did not differ from the rest of mankind in this respect and the evening of that day found many of the more curious sitting in the Lamb and Flag public house in the middle of the High Street. A regular visitor there would have found the bar unusually crowded for a Sunday evening in summer-time.
As well as the members of the parish there were also quite a number of people present from the Berebury Country Footpaths Society. They, having found the hostelry eminently satisfactory in the middle of the day, promptly repaired there again as soon as it was open in the evening to mull over the events of the afternoon. It was to them that Gordon Briggs was holding forth about the delights of the walk the Footpaths Society had missed that day.
“We’ll do it next week,” said one of his listeners, adding drily, “It won’t have run away.”
Briggs looked blank. A week might be a long time in politics; so it was in the investigation of murder.
“What are the police doing now?” asked someone else.
“They’ve gone up to Stanestede Farm,” announced Len Hodge thickly. He was standing against the bar, well into his cups.
“Ted Mason tell you that, Len?” asked his drinking companion, who was called Arthur.
Hodge shook his head. “Poor old Ted’s still seeing to everything at Pencombe.” He took a long slow pull at his beer. “No, I heard the young copper being told to get on with it at Stanestede.”
“That’ll be Crosby,” said Paul Hucham. The tall farmer had come down to
the inn from Uppercombe Farm. He had been listening attentively to Len Hodge’s recital of the discovery in the farmyard. “I heard Inspector Sloan call him Crosby.”
“He’s rather nice,” said Wendy Lamport. “I liked him.”
“He’s a policeman, isn’t he?” growled Hodge. “There’s no such animal as a nice policeman.”
“Ted Mason’s not so bad,” volunteered his neighbour, “though I must say I’d like to know where he gets his cucumber seed.”
“Seed!” snorted someone else. “You can say what you like, but I’m prepared to bet Ted doesn’t use ordinary seed. Not for those cucumbers of his. If you ask me, he buys the chitted ones.”
“What have they gone up to Stanestede for?” asked Briggs more pertinently.
“To ask Mrs. Ritchie how tall her husband was, that’s for why,” replied Len Hodge.
A little silence fell.
“My round,” said a gallant soul into the conversational vacuum which followed this remark. It was always a good idea anyway to stand the drinks early rather than late. The man had learnt that in the army.
“’Bout how long would it be since anyone saw Mr. Ritchie then?” asked Arthur, finishing his glass and pushing it back to the landlord for a refill in one practised movement. “Same again, Vic, please.”
“He hasn’t been around since I don’t know when,” said someone else.
“Beginning of June, anyway,” said Len Hodge.
“They do say,” put in the landlord with a journalistic concern for protecting his sources, “that he went on Market Day.”
“Young Jenkins didn’t see him that morning at all,” said a man standing against the bar. “Only on the Wednesday.”
“And nobody’s seen him since,” said Arthur, resuming his glass without delay. “That I do know.” He drew the top off the beer and added carefully, “Unless that’s him up there on the roof.”
“Gone to the mortuary,” Hodge updated him, “for that doctor fellow they had up there for to have a proper look at him.”
“A bad business all the same,” said Paul Hucham heavily, “whoever it is. The sooner it’s cleared up the better. Your governor’ll be pretty put out, I daresay, Len.”
“Stands to reason, doesn’t it,” said Hodge, suddenly becoming very taciturn indeed. The taciturnity might have been due to the beer; it might not.
Wendy Lamport shivered. She was there with her friend, Helen, drinking shandy. She said, “I still don’t like to think about it.”
“Don’t, then,” said Gordon Briggs, although it was actually the only thing that any of them could think—or talk—about that evening.
“No use running away from facts,” said Hucham. He turned to the farmworker for agreement. “Is there, Len?”
Hodge plunged his face into his beer tankard before he spoke. “It all depends what you mean by facts.”
Gordon Briggs, schoolmaster first, last and all the time, opened his mouth to begin a disquisition on what constituted a fact.
“Ah …,” said Len Hodge’s friend Arthur, infusing the expression with such overtones that Gordon Briggs was constrained to close his mouth again without having uttered a word.
“There’s facts and facts, isn’t there?” declared Hodge combatively.
It was the measure of the scowl on Hodge’s face that Gordon Briggs did not even speak when the man made this contradictory statement. Two varieties of fact would most certainly not have been permitted in Mr. Briggs’s class—but then his pupils were not, in the main, well over six feet tall, accustomed to hard physical work and standing against the bar in an attitude proclaiming a willingness to take on all comers.
The tall farmer from Uppercombe did not disagree with Len Hodge either. “It’s a bad business whatever way you look at it,” said Hucham.
Wendy Lamport looked troubled. “And it’s not over yet, is it?” She looked round the circle of faces. “I mean, someone must have done it and we don’t know who, do we?”
“Not yet, miss,” said Arthur. He drank some of his beer and then said slowly, “Leastways, I don’t—”
Hodge turned and began belligerently, “Now exactly what do you mean by that, Arthur Sellars?”
Even Gordon Briggs, remote and ineffectual schoolmaster, knew that when old friends started using surnames when speaking to each other there was trouble brewing. “What matters,” said the schoolmaster in the tone which he used for quelling the third form, “is whether the police know, and if they don’t, they’ll soon find out.”
“I do hope so,” said Wendy Lamport, nervously fingering her shandy glass.
“Me, too,” said her friend Helen. “I mean to say, it’s not very nice to think about it, is it?”
In his day Gordon Briggs had taught for a whole English lesson on the abuse of the word “nice” as an adjective and any boy who used it in his essays could expect to find an astringent comment on the paucity of his vocabulary written in red ink in the margin. This evening he let it go by without a murmur. What happened today at Pencombe came in his mind into the category of pure Grand Guignol, and the bar of the Lamb and Flag was no place for a lecture on a popular eighteenth-century French puppet theatre specialising in the macabre and gruesome. Its similarity to Punch and Judy shows was another matter to be held over for a different setting. There was, as Gordon Briggs himself frequently observed, a time and a place for everything.
“If you ask me,” said Wendy Lamport, staring fixedly into her glass, “there’s something funny in Dresham Wood, too.”
“Is there?” said Len Hodge, suddenly very casual.
“What makes you say that?” asked Paul Hucham, leaning forward attentively.
“You won’t laugh, will you, if I tell you?”
Nobody laughed. They all waited instead, looking at her intently.
“I had such a funny feeling when we were going through the wood yesterday morning,” she said.
“A funny feeling,” repeated Hucham in the manner of an accomplished professional listener. It was one of the techniques of the psychiatrist’s couch. Repeat what the last speaker has just said and they will go on and say more, was how the psychology textbooks put it.
“I told you about it, Gordon, didn’t I?” she said, turning to Briggs. “When we came out of the wood yesterday.”
Briggs nodded.
“What sort of funny feeling?” asked Hucham.
“That I was being watched.”
Nobody said anything at all. That was a technique used by radio and television interviewers.
Wendy hurried on. “You know the feeling, don’t you? I can’t explain it exactly but all the time I was in the wood I knew someone was looking at me.”
“Did you tell the police about it, miss?” asked Len Hodge, his face muffled by his glass.
She shook her head.
“You can’t tell the police about a feeling,” said her friend Helen sturdily. “Feelings aren’t evidence, are they?” It was a view shared by most magistrates and nearly all juries, and opened up a tempting by-path of discussion.
Wendy Lamport ignored it. “It wasn’t only a feeling,” she said.
All her listeners moved forward slightly, projecting increased interest in the finite.
“What was it, then?” asked Hodge, running his tongue over his lips.
“I saw a shoe by the path.”
“A shoe?”
She nodded.
“A man’s shoe?”
“Yes.” She nodded again. “It came back to me this afternoon after—after they’d found what was on the roof—that I’d seen it yesterday, I mean,” she went on a little incoherently, “lying by the path.”
There was a general relaxation of tension in those round the bar.
“An old shoe doesn’t amount to much, miss,” said Hodge.
“There’s always things like that in a wood,” contributed Arthur.
“People throw things away,” said Paul Hucham. “They dump stuff they don’t want on my land too.”
A certain tautness came back into the atmosphere.
“That was what I’ve just remembered, you see,” she said. “That it had gone by the time we walked that way to Mr. Bailey’s this afternoon.”
“That’s quite different,” pronounced Paul Hucham firmly. “I think I should tell the police about that if I were you.” He looked down at his watch and downed the last of his drink. “Well, I don’t know about everybody else but I must be getting along. It’s Monday tomorrow and there’s work to be done in the morning.…”
So there was for them all but Len and Arthur were easily persuaded into having another beer by Gordon Briggs and the two girls seemed in no hurry to leave the comfort and fellowship of the public house. The landlord had called “Time, gentlemen, please” more than once before the bars of the Lamb and Flag were quite emptied of people. Unfortunately no one noticed the order in which the customers left. It would have saved the police a lot of work if they had done so.
There was, of course, the usual flurry of car doors banging and cheery calls of farewell before a country stillness settled over the car-park. In the midsummer dim of night no one noticed that there was still one car left there. There was no one about either—until the next morning, that is—to see its owner lying unconscious by the side of the car.
Wendy Lamport never knew what it was that had hit her.
FIFTEEN
Our ghostly enemy restrain
“What!” bellowed Superintendent Leeyes.
’Twas on a Monday morning, all right, but he wasn’t dashing away with a smoothing iron. He was sitting at his desk in his office at Berebury Police Station wildly waving a report about in his fist. Detective Inspector Sloan had been summoned upon the instant.
“Who,” demanded Leeyes, although it was all set out for him in writing, “has been found where?”
“Wendy Lamport,” replied Sloan tautly. There was a hymn that he dimly remembered which began “Morning has broken.…” It was meant to herald the beginning of a glad day. Today wasn’t a glad day.
Harm’s Way Page 15