Harm’s Way

by Catherine Aird

  “The girl who found the finger on Saturday,” said Leeyes ominously.

  “The girl,” said Sloan astringently, “who was talking to all and sundry in the Lamb and Flag last night about there being something in the wood.”

  “That was obviously a very dangerous thing to do, Sloan, wasn’t it?”

  “We think she was simply hit on the head from behind,” said Sloan.

  Leeyes grunted. “Easy enough in the dark.”

  “She wasn’t found until this morning.” Sloan had started to piece his narrative together. “Pub people don’t get up all that early.”

  “It’s the late nights,” agreed Leeyes. “Well?”

  “She’s still alive,” reported Sloan.

  “That’s something,” said Leeyes fervently.

  “I’ve just come from the hospital.” There had been a message from Dr. Dabbe, too, but he would have to wait. Sloan had gone to see the doctor of the living first. The duty house surgeon at the Berebury District General Hospital was a young man in his first year of finding out what medicine was really all about. Passing Wendy Lamport’s distraught parents in the corridor Sloan suddenly saw the attractions of forensic pathology very clearly. Those who practised it were protected from anxious relatives as well as living patients.

  “Is she going to live?” growled Leeyes.

  Sloan couldn’t answer that. The house surgeon whom Sloan had spoken with had been altogether too guarded for his liking. The policeman, trained himself to be noncommittal, had been aware of much careful picking of words by the doctor. There were not a few unfinished sentences, too, and more than one chilling mention of the word “hope.” When doctors started talking about there always being hope Sloan knew things were pretty bad.

  “Or,” continued Leeyes militantly, “is there going to be trouble with those infernal machines?”

  Sloan winced. That was another complication. These days Death wasn’t the only alternative to Life. There was a twilight area in between comprised of tubes and oxygen and ventilators and heart pumps. In The Ballad of Reading Gaol Oscar Wilde’s doctor had said that death was but a Scientific Fact but it didn’t seem to be even that any more. Not if what Sloan had heard was anything to go by. Not if you were on a life-support machine, that is.

  “Not trouble, sir, exactly,” he answered the superintendent with deliberation.

  Wendy Lamport’s doctor hadn’t said that death was but a Scientific Fact at all. On the contrary. He had described death as a process, not an event.…

  “Then he’s never met a murderer, Sloan, has he?” said Leeyes flatly.

  “No, sir. Probably not.” Death being considered a process though at least explained some of the difficulties in diagnosing it these days. Sloan coughed. “The doctor says that if there are indications of brain death he’ll—er—pull the plug out.” He wondered if in time the phrase would succeed “kicking the bucket” and “going for a Burton.”

  “I hope he knows what he’s doing,” growled Leeyes.

  “He’s never seen an injury like Wendy Lamport’s before,” rejoined Sloan. The house surgeon had admitted as much: but then he was a very young man.

  Leeyes grunted.

  Sloan had taken a look at the girl himself, recumbent on a hospital pallet, but it hadn’t told him anything more than he knew already. To all intents and purposes Wendy Lamport was a lay figure suspended half-way between life and death. He had stood at the bottom of her bed for a moment with the house surgeon but it hadn’t helped anything except his resolve to bring whosoever had caused the injury to book.

  “I’ve got a woman police constable sitting by her bed in case she speaks,” said Sloan. It was the sum total of all that the police could do at this moment for Wendy Lamport.

  Leeyes laid the paper he had been clutching down on his desk. “I don’t like it, Sloan,” he said.

  “No, sir.”

  “It puts us into a whole new ball game.”

  “Yes, sir.” He cleared his throat. “I have to report that Mr. and Mrs. Tom Mellot cannot be located at the present time—”

  “You’re looking for them though, aren’t you, Sloan?” he growled.

  “Everyone is looking for them,” replied Sloan with feeling. He glanced down at his notebook and hurried on. “Various South American countries with whom the United Kingdom has no extradition treaties will neither confirm nor deny that Ivor Harbeton is there.”

  “If,” pronounced Leeyes, “neither the newspapers nor his creditors could find him I don’t think we shall.” It was realism that brought promotion, too.

  “And, of course,” went on Sloan doggedly, “we’re trying to establish where everyone was when the Lamb and Flag closed last night.”

  “Everyone?” said Leeyes with a graphic gesture of his free hand. “Who is everyone? Tell me that.…”

  Sloan repressed a sigh. The superintendent had an absolute gift for putting his finger on the sore point. He marshalled his thoughts. “George Mellot—”

  “Where was he?”

  “Taking the dog for a walk,” said Sloan hollowly.

  Leeyes grunted.

  “Constable Mason,” said Sloan, “was still on duty at Pencombe Farm. He says Mrs. Mellot didn’t leave the building. He didn’t,” added Sloan, “get away until after closing-time.” This was something which clearly rankled with Ted Mason. “And Sam Bailey and his wife at Lowercombe—”

  “Yes?” said Leeyes alertly. “It’s their wood, isn’t it, that the girl had been talking about? Dresham or something? You’re searching the wood, aren’t you, Sloan?”

  “Yes, sir, the men are on their way there now.” He cleared his throat. “Sam Bailey went to bed early, or so they both say.”

  “Well, they would, wouldn’t they?”

  “Mrs. Bailey,” Sloan forged on, “says she went for a little stroll before she went to bed as it had been such a hot day. She says her husband was asleep when she got back.”

  “Could a woman have done it?”

  “With the right weapon, sir,” said Sloan uneasily. “I think she could.”

  “So you are looking for two things now, are you, Sloan?”

  “Two, sir?” echoed Sloan.

  “Do I have to spell everything out?” he said irritably. “Two, Sloan. What the girl was hit with and what the head of the body was cut off with.” Gordon Briggs, the schoolmaster, would have had something to say about ending sentences with prepositions but Sloan couldn’t have put it better himself.

  “Yes, sir,” he responded readily enough. Dr. Dabbe had told them yesterday exactly what to look for in connection with the head. Or disconnection. Something heavy and sharp and slightly curved, he had said.

  “You can kill two birds with one stone, then, can’t you, Sloan?” said Leeyes felicitously, “and look for them both at the same time.”

  “Won’t keep you a moment, Inspector,” called out Dr. Dabbe as Sloan and Crosby entered the mortuary.

  Sloan ground his teeth. It was always the way when he was in a hurry.

  “I’m just finishing a George Bernard Shaw case,” announced Dr. Dabbe.

  “Pardon, Doctor?” said Sloan, a little startled.

  “A Doctor’s Dilemma,” said the consultant pathologist with a cheeriness wholly unsuited to his surroundings. “I’m the only person, you know, who can tell ’em whether they had been treating the patient for the right thing.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “And whether they did that properly,” said the pathologist as a rider. “Medical audits are a bit of a vogue at the moment.”

  Crosby pricked up his ears at the mention of the word “audit.” “Old accountants never die,” he chanted. “They just lose their balance.”

  “And you, Doctor,” said Sloan, manfully rising above this, “now tell the other doctors whether they were right or wrong in their diagnosis?” It seemed a bit late to Sloan to be of any help: like a public enquiry after a riot.

  “Bless you, Inspector,”
said Dr. Dabbe, pulling off the surgical cap which covered his hair, “I’ve always done that. That’s what post-mortems are for.”

  “Well, then …”

  “What’s new,” said the pathologist, undoing his rubber apron, “is that now the doctors tell each other.”

  “Confession is good for the soul,” observed Crosby sententiously.

  Sloan said nothing. He was possessing his own soul in patience at the moment, waiting for Dr. Dabbe to come to their particular case, where the surgery had been distinctly amateur. It was different in the police force anyway. There your superior officer told you if you had been wrong—and pretty smartly. He usually told everyone else, too, about your mistakes.…

  “It might be good for the soul,” Dr. Dabbe countered Crosby, “but it’s bad for confidence.”

  “What about truth?” Detective Inspector Sloan, well brought up by his mother, was stirred into speech in spite of himself.

  “The practice of medicine,” declared Dr. Dabbe didactically, “has nothing to do with truth.”

  “Pardon, Doctor?”

  “The practice of medicine is a purely empirical exercise, Sloan. Truth doesn’t come into it.”

  Sloan drew breath to answer.

  Dr. Dabbe forestalled him. “It is only here in the post-mortem room that truth and medicine come together.”

  “When it’s all over bar the shouting,” protested Sloan.

  “Nobody should expect perfection this side of the grave,” said Dr. Dabbe with a solemnity that Sloan found himself quite unable to measure.

  “Here we suffer grief and pain,” chimed in Crosby. “Across the road it’s just the same.”

  Sloan gave up. “About the skeleton on the barn roof,” he said weakly.

  “Ah, your chappie …” The pathologist stripped off his surgical gown and canted it adroitly into a basket for soiled linen. “I can tell you now that decapitation was almost certainly the cause of death.”

  “That doesn’t happen every day,” said Sloan.

  “No.”

  “There may have been a reason for removing the head, too,” said Sloan slowly, thinking aloud.

  “Yes, I think that’s a proper inference.” The pathologist stroked his chin. “I don’t think a psychopath would have concealed the body so carefully. They don’t care, you know.”

  Sloan did know. There were two sorts of Untouchables—those at the bottom of the caste system and those who remained untouched by human feeling. He said, “Did it—can you tell—was it taken off while the person was on the roof or before?”

  “Before,” said the pathologist without hesitation. “There wouldn’t have been enough purchase for anyone to stand on the sloping roof and swing anything down on something well below them with the force that decapitation would have needed.”

  “Besides,” agreed Sloan, “there would have been footmarks.”

  “There weren’t any footmarks,” said Crosby.

  “Then,” said the pathologist, “I assume that the head came off on terra firma.”

  “So it wasn’t an afterthought,” remarked Crosby with a perfectly straight face.

  Sloan turned to Dr. Dabbe in despair. “If you had a skull, Doctor, you could superimpose a photograph of a person over a photograph of the skull, couldn’t you?” The observation sounded to Sloan like one of those jokes children made amongst themselves. If we had some bacon we could have bacon and eggs—if we had some eggs.

  “I could indeed,” said the pathologist warmly.

  “If the cap fits …,” began Crosby from the sidelines.

  “And if we had some clothes,” said Sloan heavily, “we should have known better where to start looking for a photograph.”

  “‘The apparel oft proclaims the man.’” Dr. Dabbe quoted Polonius, reaching as he did so for the jacket of his own well-cut, professionally dark and striped suit.

  “Clothes are a dead give-away,” interposed Crosby wittily.

  “That will have been why he was naked, I expect,” said Sloan. Of course William Shakespeare had put it better. He always did.

  “The problem, from your point of view,” said the pathologist pontifically, “appears to be primarily one of identification. All the steps taken by whoever put him on the roof point in that direction.”

  “Quite so,” agreed Sloan, although he was silently following a very different train of thought himself. In artists’ representations of hell people were always depicted as naked. He’d noticed it on those half-circle things above church doors whose name sounded like something to do with the eardrum. It would come back to him presently. Hell, with its naked people, was always on the sinister side. On the other side would be heaven. Angels always came up clothed. He supposed there would be an explanation for that if he looked for it. Sigmund Freud, if nobody else, would have had a suggestion. Only one, of course. Tympanum, that was what the half circle in the church was called.…

  “And the problem from my point of view,” said the pathologist, neatly separating church and state in Sloan’s mind.

  “Yes?”

  “Establishing the cause of death if it wasn’t decapitation,” said Dr. Dabbe, “and helping you towards identification.”

  Sloan nodded. That was the doctor’s exact province.

  “I can’t help you any further with either, Sloan,” continued Dabbe. “The answer may lie in the head, of course, to both, and that may have been the reason for its removal.”

  “We’re looking for it now, Doctor.”

  “A sort of Salome in reverse,” said Crosby, moving to one side to get a specimen case out of his line of vision. “Funny sort of souvenirs you keep in here, Doctor. It isn’t cauliflower cheese, is it? That white furry stuff over there? No, I thought not.”

  “Talking about heads, Doctor,” intervened Sloan quickly, “there’s something you should know.” He told the pathologist about Wendy Lamport’s fractured skull.

  He looked grave. “That’s bad, Sloan. It means that time isn’t on your side, doesn’t it?”

  “If we hadn’t found the skeleton,” said Sloan, “she would have been all right.” It was something that was beginning to worry him. He didn’t know it that was what was called lateral thinking or not. He never even knew whether it was right to replace Fate or Predestination with coincidence or even a mad randomness. His grandmother had always added the proviso “If I’m spared” when making an engagement—just in case.

  “Disposing of the body is the eternal problem of all murderers,” he said.

  “No,” said Dr. Dabbe. “No, Sloan, it’s not.”

  “No, Doctor? What is, then?”

  “Eternity itself,” said the pathologist-turned-philosopher solemnly.

  “Ah.”

  “Dante,” said Dr. Dabbe, picking up something that looked remarkably like a stainless steel chisel and pointing it at Sloan the better to punctuate his remarks, “had Julius Caesar’s murderers devoured eternally by Satan in the bottommost pit of hell.”

  “That’s different,” objected Sloan. The Last Judgement might be a sort of catch-all for police officers who had been unsuccessful in solving a crime, but it didn’t absolve a detective from doing his duty.

  “Not really.…”

  “I shall be quite happy to settle for the dock of the Crown Court at Calleford,” said Sloan firmly. That was as far as a simple police officer needed to go: everything else could safely be left to St. Peter. “Come along, Crosby, there’s work to be done.…”

  “Where to, sir?” asked Detective Constable Crosby, tumbling into the police car. He liked driving fast cars fast.

  “Great Rooden,” said Sloan with a distinct sense of relief. Great Rooden was where the action had been and that was where the police should be: not in police stations or hospitals or mortuaries.

  “Great Rooden it is,” said Crosby, engaging gear.

  “Lowercombe Farm first,” said Sloan. They would go back to the Lamb and Flag too, and Pencombe Farm, but a visit to Lowercombe Farm ca
me first.

  “We’re on our way,” said Crosby unnecessarily. The police car was in top gear already.

  “Dresham Wood, to be exact,” said Sloan. Other policemen from F Division, led by Constable Ted Mason on account of his local knowledge, had already been searching it for some time. The first thing that Sloan had done after hearing about the attack on Wendy Lamport had been to order men there. He hadn’t known what to tell them to look for: he had just asked to be told if there was anything there that wasn’t usual in a wood. Ten to one a comedian would report a great crested tit and expect him to laugh and he wouldn’t.…

  “To the woods, to the woods,” chanted Crosby joyously.

  “Crosby, it may have escaped your notice,” interposed Sloan mildly, “that one of Traffic Division’s unmarked cars is right behind you.”

  “Lawks ’a’ mercy,” croaked Crosby. The speed of the police car fell appreciably.

  “I don’t have to remind you,” went on Sloan smoothly, “that Inspector Harpe takes a very strict view of unnecessary speeding by police vehicles.” Inspector Harpe was the head of Berebury’s Traffic Division and was known throughout the Calleshire force as Happy Harry because he had never been seen to smile. On his part Inspector Harpe maintained that in Traffic Division there had never been anything yet at which to even twitch a lip.

  “Yes, sir,” said Crosby with unexpected docility.

  Sloan made no further comment, but sat back in his seat and tried to marshal his thoughts instead.

  It wasn’t easy.

  He stared unseeingly out of the window of the car as the Calleshire countryside went by. The summer scene was a beautiful one, but his mind’s eye was centred on an innocent girl hovering between life and death in a hospital bed and someone out at Great Rooden prepared to kill not once but twice and he—they—still didn’t even know why, let alone who. He didn’t even have the beginnings of a picture in his mind of the sort of person the murderer might be.

  Ruthless, of course. That went without saying. Pitilessness was one characteristic common to all killers.

  Strong. Even with a fork-lift tractor getting a body up and onto a roof took strength.