Stiff News

by Catherine Aird

  ‘That’s what we don’t know,’ said the Brigadier. ‘That’s the trouble.’

  Miss Bentley looked round. ‘Didn’t she tell anyone?’

  ‘Not us, anyway,’ declared MacIver.

  ‘Not Matron, either,’ said Markyate, ‘because I asked her.’

  ‘That I can believe,’ said Miss Bentley trenchantly, ‘because Matron would have done something straight away.’

  They all nodded. On this they were agreed. Matron was a woman of action.

  MacIver said, ‘Believe you me, Hetty, we’re as perplexed as everyone else.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Miss Bentley, wearing a facial expression which over the years had withered staff, parents and pupils alike. ‘It isn’t,’ she remarked thoughtfully, ‘as if Gertie had held with all this medical business of Living Wills. You know, signing statements when you’re fit and well that you don’t want to be revived if you’re ever so ill that your quality of life has gone.’

  Peter Markyate said, ‘She wasn’t ever one to hand decisions over to anyone else. Not Gertie.’

  ‘And definitely not to doctors,’ said Bryant.

  ‘Rather not.’ Captain Markyate endorsed this immediately. ‘And she told ’em so at the hospital, too. Don’t you remember how she got quite upset when some whippersnapper of a house physician asked her if she wanted to be resuscitated if she collapsed in there. Life was always worth living, she said. Gave them her curtain lecture on the importance of enjoying life to the full.’

  ‘And to the bitter end,’ said Bryant.

  ‘One of her favourite sayings, if you remember,’ said Hamish MacIver, ‘was that life was quite short enough as it was.’

  ‘And that one about “the best was yet to be”,’ said Markyate gruffly. ‘Remember?’

  ‘She wasn’t riddled with arthritis,’ said Miss Bentley feelingly.

  ‘Gertie always seemed quite content with things as they were,’ murmured Markyate. ‘That was one of the best things about her.’

  The Brigadier said, ‘She wouldn’t ever become a member of the Escape Committee.’

  ‘Not ever,’ agreed Markyate. ‘I mean,’ he added, flustered, ‘she hadn’t joined and then changed her mind, if you know what I mean. Some people,’ he bumbled on, ‘do.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ volunteered Walter Bryant, looking a little embarrassed. ‘Take myself, for instance. Knowing Margot Ritchie has wrought a big change in the way I now see things … I’m resigning with immediate effect.’

  Miss Bentley looked as if she was about to speak but then thought better of it.

  ‘I’m thinking very differently these days,’ he went on earnestly, ‘about almost everything.’

  ‘Circumstances alter cases,’ said the Brigadier diplomatically.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Miss Bentley again.

  ‘Elizabeth Forbes just changed her mind,’ put in Peter Markyate, ‘between one day and the next.’

  ‘Don’t know why, I’m sure,’ said the Brigadier. ‘It’s all right for old Walter here, but any change in circumstances there, poor woman, was for the worse surely.’

  Walter Bryant looked shrewdly across at him. ‘And what about Maisie Carruthers, Hamish? Will she join now she’s here, do you think? Or doesn’t she believe in our Escape Committee and the Almstone Pragmatic Sanction?’

  The Brigadier stiffened visibly, his face turning a turkey-red. ‘I really have no idea at all,’ he said distantly. ‘You’ll have to ask her that yourselves. I’m keeping out of it.’

  * * *

  In Sloan’s book ‘getting moving’ also included interviewing Judge Calum Gillespie. That aged legal gentleman received Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby in his room at the Manor with an old-fashioned courtesy.

  ‘Is this a duty visit, officers,’ he enquired, ‘or may I offer you both a glass of Madeira? I’ve got some very passable Old Trinity House Bual here if you would like it.’

  ‘Duty, I’m afraid, sir,’ said Sloan. He knew full well that in the Judge’s private world officers and gentlemen and just plain officers were two quite different categories of men.

  ‘Pity. You will, I trust, not think me uncivil if I myself indulge?’

  ‘Indeed not,’ said Sloan truthfully. If there was one Latin tag fully appreciated by every policeman it was in vino veritas.

  ‘At my time of life a little alcohol helps keep the arteries open.’ Judge Gillespie tottered to a side table and unstoppered a cut-glass decanter. Sloan watched as the neck of the decanter danced dangerously over the sherry glass. Miraculously, though, it never actually touched it and equally marvellously the Judge carried the full glass back without actually spilling it. He sat down and took a sip, saying, ‘Ah, that’s better. Now, settle down and tell me why you’ve come to see me. I don’t get many visitors from the – ah – outside world these days.’

  ‘We have reason to believe that the late Mrs Powell,’ began Sloan without preamble, ‘thought she was being murdered.’

  ‘And does anyone else think so?’ Two bright birdlike eyes regarded the two policemen with lively interest.

  ‘No one whom we know about,’ said Sloan with care.

  ‘And was she?’ The Judge turned his head to one side quizzically. ‘Murdered, I mean.’

  ‘We don’t know yet.’ Sloan saw no reason for prevarication. The Judge might have got a tremor but he still seemed to have all his marbles as well.

  ‘Ah…’ Calum Gillespie took another appreciative sip of the Bual before using two hands to lower the glass onto an occasional table. ‘Would it be – er – presumptuous of me to enquire whether you, too, have grounds for thinking she might have been?’

  ‘Not, sir, what you could call really firm evidence,’ replied Sloan, giving him full marks for getting straight to the heart of the matter. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I see.’ The Judge drew his eyebrows together in a prodigious frown and became sunk in thought. ‘Difficult for you … for everybody.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan, experienced giver of evidence, waited much as he would have done – did – in court. Judges always took as long as they needed – as long as they wanted – to think. It was one of their privileges. It was not for them to be harried into ill-considered speech by counsel or trapped into the all too revealing ‘response immediate’.

  ‘And would I be right,’ the old man said at long last, ‘in concluding therefore that the result of any post-mortem examination has so far been inconclusive?’

  ‘Awaiting the full report,’ said Sloan ambiguously. Not only had the old boy got all his marbles but they were patently in excellent working order.

  ‘Why, then, Inspector, might I ask, have you come to see me?’

  ‘For background,’ said Sloan glibly. Too glibly, because Crosby seemed to think that the word needed amplification.

  The constable looked earnestly at the frail old man and said in loud tones, ‘We want to know, sir, if there’s been any dirty work at the crossroads that you know about here at the Manor.’

  ‘There’s always been dirty work at the crossroads, Constable,’ the Judge said unexpectedly.

  Crosby said, ‘I know but…’

  ‘Because the crossroads were always where they had the gibbet,’ said Calum Gillespie hortatively, reaching for his glass of Madeira.

  ‘I didn’t mean then,’ protested Crosby. ‘I meant now.’

  ‘And they had it there,’ went on the nonagenarian, serenely disregarding the detective constable’s remarks, ‘because the crossroads were usually where the parish boundaries met and they always had the gibbet on the boundary if they could … saved having two and kept it out of your own backyard.’

  ‘Quite so,’ Detective Inspector Sloan came in smoothly, reminding himself that in the early days of this Judge they had hanged men. And women. What Crosby needed was hanging out to dry. He leaned forward and said, ‘I wonder, sir, if you would care to tell us why you are so very attached to your old coat?’

  The glass th
at had so nearly reached Judge Calum Gillespie’s lips fell suddenly out of his nerveless hands, sending its delectable contents spilling out stickily over the old man’s suit.

  ‘Why have you come?’ he quavered breathlessly, his face turning an unhealthy shade of purple. ‘Who sent you here?’

  Chapter Eleven

  Early or late

  They stoop to fate

  ‘Then what happened?’ Superintendent Leeyes wanted to know. As was always his wont, he was sitting comfortably in the relative calm of his own office.

  ‘He rolled over and played dead,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, who was standing uneasily at the other side of the Superintendent’s desk. He and Crosby had got back to Berebury Police Station at long last only to find Leeyes ready and waiting, spider-like, to rush out and ensnare them in his web. ‘For all that he’d been a judge in his day.’

  ‘Which he wasn’t, I take it?’ Leeyes said. ‘Dead, I mean.’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Sloan. ‘Far from it, in fact.’

  ‘Alive and kicking,’ contributed Crosby.

  ‘Oh, we whistled up a couple of care staff pretty quickly,’ said Sloan, ‘and they brisked about a bit. Got him cleaned up and so forth and then into bed, but…’

  ‘But he wouldn’t talk to us at all after that, sir,’ put in the detective constable. ‘Couldn’t get a dicky bird out of him for love nor money.’

  ‘And we can’t make him talk,’ said Leeyes more than a little wistfully. Some of the more liberal provisions of the new Police and Criminal Evidence Act had not gone down at all well with the Superintendent of F Division of the Calleshire County Constabulary.

  ‘No, sir,’ replied Sloan rather more firmly than perhaps he should have done. ‘We can’t.’

  ‘Was he mute of malice?’ enquired Leeyes with interest. ‘We might get him for that.’

  ‘More like mute of enlightened self-interest,’ said Sloan, who had himself picked something up from the class the Superintendent had once attended on ‘The Whig Supremacy’.

  Leeyes glared at his two subordinates, the reference now quite lost upon him. ‘So what exactly is going on out there?’

  ‘Something, I’m sure,’ said Sloan fairly, before Crosby could speak, ‘but we don’t know exactly what. Yet.’

  ‘Well, you’d better find out pretty quickly,’ said Leeyes, ‘because we’ll have old Locombe-Stableford on our backs in no time at all. To say nothing,’ he added gloomily, ‘of the press. I can see the headlines now.’

  So unfortunately could Sloan. And you couldn’t get anything cornier than ‘Mystery at the Manor’. Or ‘Who Moved Mysterious Figure in the Bedroom?’ Bedrooms always made good headlines. Figures in bedrooms, even better.

  Leeyes shuffled some papers about on his desk. ‘All I can say, Sloan, is if the pathologist can’t come up with the answer, then you’ll have to.’

  ‘I don’t know about the deceased and her last letter, sir,’ he said, ignoring this, ‘but my own feeling is that Judge Gillespie knew exactly what he was doing when he dropped his sherry glass and started playing dumb crambo with us.’

  ‘It seems to me,’ pronounced Leeyes crustily, ‘that the only people out there who don’t seem to know what they are doing are you and Crosby here.’

  Crosby took this literally. ‘Could be, sir. All the others seem to be sticking together. After all, they or their husbands were all in the same regiment together.’

  ‘And,’ pounced Leeyes, ‘I suppose that any minute now one of you is going to tell me that everyone in the place has been trained to kill silently and without trace as well.’

  Sloan was only half listening. His mind was already running through all that would have to be done the next day. Like those who had buried Sir John Moore at Corunna, he too could only bitterly think of the morrow.

  ‘All the men, anyway,’ he responded absently.

  * * *

  The coming of Saturday morning had created something of a dilemma for Mrs Maisie Carruthers. On the one hand she itched to appear at breakfast and glean the very latest news. On the other hand her son, Ned, didn’t work on Saturdays and he had promised to come to see her as soon as he could. And on one thing she was quite determined and that was to receive him whilst she was still in her bed. He need never know about her debut in the dining room the day before.

  Oblique questioning of Hazel Finch when she brought up her breakfast tray had got Maisie little further than learning that the police had finally left the Manor after talking to the Judge and just before the evening meal.

  ‘I thought we’d never get him undressed,’ lamented Hazel, ‘he was so all to pieces. I don’t know what those two policemen had said to him, I’m sure. Not that you’ll know the Judge, Mrs Carruthers, being as how you only arrived here yesterday.’

  ‘Known him for years,’ said Mrs Carruthers laconically.

  ‘Well, I never,’ said Hazel.

  ‘Fine figure of a man he was, too, then.’ She gave a reminiscent smile. ‘In the war.’

  ‘Uniform always does something for a man, doesn’t it?’ said Hazel wistfully. ‘Now, that young policeman who came here yesterday. He’d have been the better for being in uniform.’

  ‘I dare say,’ said Maisie, ‘though I’m not sure how he would have looked in a kilt.’

  ‘You don’t think of policemen having knees, somehow,’ said Hazel, ‘do you?’

  ‘Some of them wore shorts. That was when they were in North Africa,’ said Mrs Carruthers, looking back in her mind’s eye over half a century. She sighed. ‘A handsome lot they all were, too. The Judge, the Brigadier, Mr Bryant, even,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘Captain Markyate and look at them now…’

  ‘Poor Captain Markyate. He was in ever such a state last night, too,’ volunteered Hazel.

  Maisie Carruthers sat up suddenly. ‘Had the police…’

  ‘It was Friday, you see.’

  ‘Friday?’

  ‘The grace,’ said the care assistant. ‘We – they – always have the regimental grace said at dinner on Friday evenings.’

  ‘I think I remember it from the old days…’ began Maisie. In fact the only grace she actually remembered had been the rude soldiery chanting ‘Rub-a-dub-dub, thank God for our grub’ outside the cookhouse door.

  ‘The Judge usually says it but he wasn’t up to it last night and so Captain Markyate had to step in.’

  ‘Why not the Brigadier?’ she asked curiously. ‘Surely he’s more senior?’

  But this Hazel did not know.

  ‘And what,’ Maisie led her on cunningly, ‘is going to happen now about Mrs Powell’s funeral?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ confessed Hazel. ‘The undertaker – young Mr Morton – ever such a polite man he is, Mrs Carruthers, he was on the phone to Matron first thing saying it’s never happened to his firm before and how sorry he is about it all.’

  ‘I’m sure he is,’ said Maisie Carruthers astringently.

  ‘But he doesn’t seem to know anything more than anyone else. I reckon,’ she added with unconsciously cold-blooded realism, ‘he’ll soon be out here anyway for Mrs Forbes.’

  Mrs Carruthers sat up alertly. ‘Is she a member of the Escape Committee then?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ said the care assistant incuriously, ‘but she’s going downhill fast and you can’t be sorry … especially when she’s got nobody.’

  ‘Her husband went into the bag at Tobruk,’ said Mrs Carruthers. ‘He was a prisoner of war for years.’

  ‘What about your husband?’ asked Hazel tentatively.

  ‘He was lucky,’ said the old lady. ‘He got out of the Tinchel at Wadi el Gebra with only a wounded knee. He limped for ever afterwards.’

  The care assistant seized on something she understood. ‘That was a pity for him, wasn’t it? Having to choose between shorts and a kilt with a bad knee. Now, don’t you go and let your toast get cold…’

  * * *

  ‘How can I help you?’ Hilary Collins was the Deput
y Curator of the Greatorex Museum, which was the reason why she and not the Curator himself was on duty in the museum on Saturday mornings.

  Detective Inspector Sloan laid an object in a polythene bag on the desk before her.

  The young woman regarded it with academic detachment and repeated her question.

  Detective Constable Crosby stirred. ‘Well, for starters, miss, is it animal, vegetable or mineral?’

  ‘Mineral,’ she said, shooting an odd look in his direction.

  She, thought Sloan, would have been a good person to have had with them at the Manor the previous evening when they had tracked the green ornament down in the library there. This was not so much a room of books as a regimental museum. Mrs Powell’s ornamental piece had joined a bizarre collection of trophies of war and blood sports.

  ‘Glazed composition, actually,’ said Hilary Collins, taking off her glasses for a closer look.

  ‘I see,’ said Sloan. This was why it hadn’t really fitted in among the other memorabilia – which were chiefly fur and feather – of the Fearnshires. It had certainly looked out of place where it was – sitting between some ancient and very tattered bagpipes and a Scottish wild cat, itself a triumph of the art of taxidermy, which was stretched out along the top of a bookcase.

  ‘It’s an amulet,’ said Hilary Collins.

  ‘And what might an amulet be, miss?’ he asked. His question owed nothing to his police training and everything to his childhood. The precept ‘If you don’t ask, you’ll never know’ had been ground into him early on. The extra adjuration ‘Don’t guess because that shows two things you don’t know’ had come at school later.

  ‘An ancient good-luck charm,’ the Deputy Curator informed him.

  Crosby uttered a sound that might have been a snort.

  ‘What else can you tell us about it, miss?’ said Sloan before the constable could say anything about the quality of luck that had attended Gertie Powell. He himself would have liked to have known a little more about some of the other artefacts in the Manor library. Claymores, dirks and skean-dhus adorned the wall alongside the antlers of long-deceased stags and vulpine heads. After ten minutes in the room he had not been at all sure that former members of the Fearnshires had distinguished between war and blood sports. Under one pointed vulpine mask were the words ‘Foxhole – Wadi el Gebra, 1942’.