Clever. The barn roof had been a good place to hide a victim. Sloan didn’t doubt for a moment that the victim’s head too was somewhere nobody would think of looking. They would have to search for that when they had finished going through the wood. And after that there was the weapon which had been used to hit Wendy Lamport to look for, to say nothing of the instrument that had separated the first victim’s head from his shoulders.
Even that catalogue didn’t include finding who it was that had killed the man on the roof, whoever he was. Who he was was something else they didn’t know. All in all the police hadn’t made a lot of progress to date.
It transpired that Crosby, too, had been thinking. “I suppose, sir, that that attack on the girl last night lets Tom Mellot out.”
“I don’t see why,” objected Sloan sourly. It rankled a little that Tom Mellot hadn’t been found. A man, his wife, two children and a white Sealyham terrier with a black patch over one ear shouldn’t have been able to be swallowed up into the background quite so easily. “He could be anywhere.”
Crosby hunched his shoulders over the wheel as they passed out of the thirty-mile-an-hour limit. “It would have narrowed the field, that’s all, if we could have counted him out.”
“Narrowed the field,” echoed Sloan richly. “Narrowed the field!” He countered simile with simile. “Do you realise, Crosby, that we don’t even know the names of the runners yet?”
Crosby took this literally. “George Mellot.”
“His barn, of course,” conceded Sloan.
“Len Hodge.”
“He would call it his fork-lift tractor,” said Sloan drily. “And it was his fight.”
“Sam Bailey and his wife,” said Crosby.
“Their wood,” agreed Sloan. Time would tell what was in their wood.
“Andrina Ritchie.”
“Her husband gone,” said Sloan. “I must say she sounded as if she would have killed him if she could.”
“Tom Mellot.”
“His firm,” said Sloan.
“He’d have known his way around the farmyard, all right,” said Crosby. “He was born there.”
“And Len Hodge would have helped him, I expect,” said Sloan. “He’d known him all his life, remember.” Those were the people you turned to in real need. The early companions on life’s journey were linked by a bond of time and place. When it came to the crunch they didn’t let you down. Women were inclined to joke about the old school tie, but it was a bond for all that. It didn’t have to be a silk one with a crest and a Latin motto on it either. The early association was what counted, be it the council school at the end of the street not named after anyone at all, founded like as not by the stroke of a committee’s pen as a consequence of some reforming Act of Parliament, or a Gothic pile set up by an English king in a moment spared from battle or politicking with the French. It didn’t matter.
Or a village school that everyone’s son went to.
“Paul Hucham?” said Crosby tentatively.
“He seems clean.” Sloan knew better than to absolve anyone on those grounds alone.
“He was in the Lamb and Flag last night.”
“He can lift a sheep,” said Sloan absently, remembering his visit to Uppercombe Farm. “Not that that makes him a murderer …”
The search-party had found something in Dresham Wood. Sloan could tell from the whole mien of the man who walked towards him as they arrived. Constable Mason wasn’t able to keep the satisfaction out of his voice either as he reported to Sloan.
SIXTEEN
Nor phantoms of the night appear
Superintendent Leeyes’ response was dampening.
“It doesn’t sound a lot to me,” he said down the telephone line from Berebury Police Station to Sam Bailey’s farmhouse at Great Rooden.
“Someone,” insisted Sloan, “has been living in Dresham Wood.”
All the signs were there. Police Constable Mason had taken Sloan to see them. There was a thicket not far from the water’s edge that had first attracted the attention of the police. A few leafy branches had been bent over some bushes to provide a sort of shelter and round about it were more signs of human habitation. Grass had been squashed down where someone had lain and twigs snapped off.…
“Found a camp-fire, have you?” grunted Leeyes.
There had been no burnt-out remains of a fire. Whoever had been living in the wood had not cooked food nor seen a winter out in the open.
“Footprints,” replied Sloan succinctly. Even now a police constable was making a plaster cast of what looked like a size eight man’s shoe, noticeably down at heel. “And litter …”
There were no dustbins in Dresham Wood and it seemed that no one could live without creating debris. Archaeologists fell upon Roman rubbish dumps with delight for the information they gave.
So did detectives.
“Not just someone camping out?” enquired Leeyes.
“Someone living rough, I should say,” said Sloan judiciously.
“A stake-out?”
“We found some food,” said Sloan, cradling the telephone receiver between his ear and his shoulder the better to be able to turn over the pages of his notebook. He cleared his throat and said with deliberation, “Proper food.”
The line crackled. “What exactly do you mean by that, Sloan?”
“Properly cooked food,” elaborated Sloan. “The end of a joint of beef. Pieces of fruit-cake. Home-made fruit-cake,” he added pointedly. Constable Mason, part-time gourmand, had been most insistent about the good quality of the fruit-cake: had said it was important. And so it was.
Leeyes grunted. “Anything else?”
“Bottles,” said Sloan.
“Ah …”
“They weren’t obvious, of course,” said Sloan. “They were tucked away.”
“They usually are,” said Leeyes.
“Even when there is a dustbin,” agreed Sloan. The disposal of bottles was a perennial problem for real drinkers.
“It’s not a crime to live rough,” observed Leeyes, “and it doesn’t mean that he—whoever he is—is a murderer.”
“It’s a funny thing to do, all the same,” continued Sloan stoutly, bolstered by that piece in the Bible about foxes having holes and the birds of the air having nests.
“You didn’t get him, I suppose?” said Leeyes mordantly.
“No,” said Sloan, adding a rather belated “sir.” It was marvellous how the superintendent always managed to touch a raw spot. Ted Mason’s search-party had done all the right things—like throwing a cordon round the wood before they went into it. Nothing, the village constable had insisted, could have popped out without being caught. No more, he had said, than a rabbit could have escaped a harvest shoot, not if it had taken refuge in the centre of a field, that is. In the end the reaper and binder—only that had got some newfangled name now and it wasn’t even called a harvester any more—cut down all the cover and the rabbits didn’t have anywhere else to hide.
“So, Sloan, the bird had flown by the time you’d got there,” said Leeyes, contriving not only to touch a raw spot but to put his underlings in the wrong at the same time. That was a gift, too.
Sloan took a resolution about not being too defensive. “There was no one in the wood by the time it was searched,” he said without any inflexion at all.
“And no one knows anything about anything, I suppose,” said Leeyes testily.
“Sam Bailey says he doesn’t,” said Sloan. “I’ve just interviewed him.” The old farmer was behaving exactly like James Forsyte and carrying on about nobody telling him anything.
“Hrrrrmmmpph,” said Leeyes.
“And Mrs. Bailey,” reported Sloan, “left by car before the search-party arrived for Calleford. Or so her husband says. She didn’t say when she would be back.”
Leeyes grunted. “And what has Len Hodge got to say for himself?”
“The Great Rooden fire brigade was called out to a barn said to be on fire over at Easterbro
ok. That’s to the north of the parish,” added Sloan, “but it’s quite a way from here. Leading fireman Hodge was at the wheel of the tender and the crew hasn’t come back yet.”
“Said to be on fire?” Leeyes picked up kernels as quickly as a sow after acorns.
“False alarm, malicious intent,” said Sloan neatly. Every service had its own short-speak and the fire brigade was no exception.
“Funny time for fun and games like that, first thing Monday morning,” grunted Leeyes.
“They think it’s a boy playing truant,” said Sloan. There was a world of work and school—a better-regulated world than the one in which Sloan lived and had his being—in which work began on Monday morning and finished—for better or worse—on Friday afternoon.
“So we don’t even know if Hodge knows about the girl, Wendy Lamport, being found yet?”
“That’s difficult to say,” answered Sloan slowly. In remote villages like Great Rooden it was impossible to know who knew what. It was akin to working in a fog, not knowing what was going on around you and not being able to see who was talking to whom. And sometimes, too, hearing things and not knowing from whence they came …
“Or about the wood being searched,” said Leeyes.
“No,” agreed Sloan. One thing, though, was certain about villages and that was that news spread like wildfire. He, a detective inspector from the far-away town, wasn’t going to be silly enough to say who knew what in Great Rooden. He was prepared to bet, all the same, that everyone in Great Rooden knew that he, Sloan, was back in the parish and that Dresham Wood had been searched.
“He’ll hear soon enough if he doesn’t,” said Leeyes realistically.
“Yes, sir.” What Sloan would like to have known was how many people knew that someone—a man, if the footprint was anything to go by—had been living in the wood.
And for how long.
He’d told them to leave the bottles where they were. A biologist might be able to look underneath them and say how long they’d been lying there. Mould told the experts quite a lot as well. Crosby was taking some fingerprints from one of the bottles at this moment. He’d found them round the neck. Whoever had been living in the wood had not troubled with a glass.
“This mysterious stranger that Len Hodge had a fight with, Sloan—”
“I shall be talking to him about that,” promised Sloan, “as soon as I can get hold of him. And about one or two other things as well.”
“What about the Mellots?” said Leeyes. He was like a terrier with its teeth into the seat of somebody’s trousers: he wasn’t going to let go.
“I’m going there now,” said Sloan, “but I’m prepared to bet that they’ll say that they don’t know anything about anything, too.”
“Clams,” agreed Leeyes reflectively, “don’t have anything on people in villages. Touch ’em and they close up.”
Somewhere at the back of his mind was something Sloan had once read and remembered. It had been written by that prescient fellow who had written about 1984 and all that. “Those who have the beans,” he quoted neatly, “seldom spill them.”
Detective Constable Crosby was stowing the fingerprint gear back into the police car when Sloan emerged from Lowercombe Farm, blinking a little in the sunlight. It had been dark and cool inside the ancient farmhouse. Old Sam Bailey had been pacing up and down all the while, anxiety manifesting itself as crossness. He followed Sloan outside now rather like an old dog with nothing else to think about.
“What shall I do next?” he asked rather pathetically.
“Try to think of places where your wife might have gone,” commanded Sloan crisply, “and ring her up and ask her to come back home.”
Talking to Mrs. Elsie Bailey had become suddenly very relevant. He hadn’t forgotten that there had been leaf-mould on her shoes yesterday afternoon; had it only been yesterday afternoon? It seemed aeons ago. If he, Sloan, had acted more promptly yesterday afternoon he might have saved Wendy Lamport from being injured. He braced himself mentally: policemen had to live with such thoughts just as doctors did. If you couldn’t, you didn’t make the grade. Detective inspectors and general practitioners were the survivors.
The grizzled farmer nodded and made his way back indoors looking more bewildered than ever, his pepperiness suddenly evaporated.
“We’re going over to the Mellots’ next,” said Sloan to Crosby, “to see what they’ve got to say for themselves.”
“A proper Teddy bears’ picnic, that was, in the wood,” remarked Crosby, slamming the car boot lid shut.
“Yes,” responded Sloan briefly, his mind on something else.
“‘If you go down to the woods today,’” chanted the constable, “‘you’re sure of a big surprise.’”
“No,” said Sloan seriously. “We knew all along that there was something in the wood. What we didn’t know was what it was.”
“A man,” said Crosby. “Not much doubt about that now.”
“He’d been there for quite a while,” said Sloan. “All the evidence points to that.”
“The bottles and things,” agreed Crosby largely.
“Doesn’t that strike you as strange?” said Sloan.
“I’ve never liked the idea of living rough myself,” said Crosby, opening the driver’s door.
“We’re walking to Pencombe,” said Sloan.
“Oh.” He shut the door.
“A man,” said Sloan, returning to the matter at hand, “has been living rough in Dresham Wood probably for several weeks and yet Ted Mason, who is said by everyone to know all about Great Rooden, didn’t know about him. Doesn’t that strike you as strange?”
“I thought Ted’s beat was so quiet he could hear the grass growing,” agreed Crosby.
“Exactly.” Sloan tightened his lips. “It’s as funny as Len Hodge having a stand-up fight with a total stranger.”
“You don’t have total strangers in villages like this,” concurred Crosby, falling into step beside Sloan in more ways than one.
“A stranger who is said not to have been seen since.”
“We’ve got a spare stranger,” offered Crosby in melancholy tones. “Over at the mortuary.”
“All we know,” persisted Sloan, “is that a month ago a man was killed and last night a girl was badly injured.”
“That’s not a coincidence,” said Crosby.
“No,” said Sloan reflectively, “I don’t think it is. Although I must say I don’t see the connection just at the moment.”
“I wonder what would have happened if that crow hadn’t dropped the finger just where it did,” said Crosby.
“Wendy Lamport would be at work this morning for one thing,” said Sloan soberly, “and not lying at death’s door.” Justice was a purely abstract concept and was something quite different.
“It’s all a bit difficult, though, isn’t it?” said the detective constable.
“Complaining before you get to the stile, Crosby?” said Sloan appositely as the road between the two farms came into view.
“We still don’t know anything for certain,” insisted the constable. He didn’t like walking and it brought out the worst in him.
“Just that harm was done to Wendy Lamport,” said Sloan, “and that about a month ago an unknown man was killed. That’s about all we know.”
“We aren’t even sure it was murder,” grumbled Crosby. “The doctor won’t put that in black and white.”
“The body was decapitated and placed out of sight.”
“Good enough for a jury, I suppose,” said Crosby, capitulating on this particular point. “They won’t go for an accident or misadventure.”
“And left naked,” said Sloan, putting a foot on the stile at the beginning of the footpath to Pencombe. Naked Truth he knew all about. She appeared in a famous picture. Naked Villainy presumably had a long heritage too. He didn’t know if there was any connection, but he did know that the nakedness would weigh heavily with the jury. So would the decapitation. The command “of
f with his head” was something usually reserved for the enigmatic world of Alice in Wonderland and Tudor politics—not the contemporary English rural scene. Naked men didn’t really belong either.…
Crosby scuffed at a stone with his shoe.
“After which,” continued Sloan steadily, “nothing happened at all until the finger was found.”
That was interesting in itself. There had been no hue and cry, no missing person reported, no pleas of the “Come home, all forgiven” variety, no welcoming lamp burning in the window at eventide.…
Presumably the waters had closed over someone as surely as if they had never been—and yet that didn’t make sense either. Someone sufficiently important to be disposed of with such care must have been very much in someone else’s way. It was also, it suddenly occurred to Sloan, a case of the victim being someone whose death didn’t need to be known about to achieve the outcome the murderer wanted.
Or murderers.
They mustn’t, Sloan reminded himself, forget that it wasn’t only in the plays of William Shakespeare that murderers came up in pairs. It happened in real life, too. At the very least whoever put the body on the roof of the barn at Pencombe would have needed a look-out. Unless it had been the Mellots, of course. And if it hadn’t been the Mellots then they would have to have been got out of the way by somebody.
And if it hadn’t been Len Hodge so would he.
To say nothing of the dog.
If the Mellots and Len Hodge had both been got out of way then, supposed Sloan, it wouldn’t have mattered very much if the dog had barked because then there wouldn’t have been anyone there to hear it. In his view this did not mean that the sound had not occurred—although it had been on this very point that he had parted intellectual company with the science master at school. Sound did not exist, the old dominie had declared, unless there was an ear to hear it. Sound was merely a series of waves emanating from an action and pulsating through the atmosphere. It was the receiving ear that turned those waves into sound.
“Pencombe’s farther away than it looks, isn’t it?” remarked Crosby mundanely.
“The walk will do you good,” responded Sloan unfeelingly. “Besides, it’s giving us time to think.” Police action was, of course, taking place as well. There was an unmarked police car shadowing leading fireman Len Hodge and the Great Rooden fire brigade over at Easterbrook and every policeman in Calleshire was on the lookout for Mrs. Elsie Bailey and her car. Every force in the country was on the alert for Mr. and Mrs. Tom Mellot, two small children, and a white Sealyham terrier with a black patch over its left ear.
Harm’s Way Page 17