A Going Concern

by Catherine Aird

  Detective Inspector Sloan, who knew the value of silence better than most men, waited.

  Eventually the man went on: ‘I suppose the only people left now who might know would be Alfred Harris and Miss Camus …’

  ‘Miss Kate Camus?’ It was the last name on Sloan’s list.

  Didot looked knowingly at Sloan and rubbed the side of his nose. ‘If you ask me, she was a bit sweet on William Garamond but it was Rikki-Tikki-Tavi who he married.’

  Sloan said urgently: ‘Where would I find Miss Camus, Mr Didot?’

  ‘Nobody knows that, Inspector. She left Chernwoods’ just after the war and hasn’t been heard from since. Didn’t you know?’

  ‘That you, Sloan? Dabbe here. Where the devil have you been?’

  ‘Out and about,’ said Sloan truthfully. ‘And here and there … trying to identify an unconscious girl mostly.’

  ‘Well,’ said Dabbe, who was seldom concerned with the living, ‘I’ve just been talking to my old friend Stony Agate. You remember – the forensic toxicologist I told you about.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Sloan. ‘You met over a dead leg.’

  ‘Well, he’s pretty sure that that old lady of yours …’

  Mrs Octavia Garamond was every bit the pathologist’s case, too, but Sloan didn’t say so. ‘Yes?’ he invited.

  ‘Stony, that’s what we called Agate – I did tell you that, Sloan, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes, doctor …’

  ‘Well, Stony says …’

  There had been a game that Sloan had played when young called ‘Simon says …’ He must remember to teach it to his son. If, that is, if he ever got home before the boy went to bed.

  ‘Stony now says he thinks the deceased probably died from inhaling a vapour …’

  Detective Inspector Sloan’s head came up. ‘A vapour, doctor?’

  ‘Well, gas if you’d rather …’

  ‘Poison gas?’

  ‘Fumes given off by adding sodium hydroxide to ethylene chlorhydrin,’ said Dr Dabbe down the telephone.

  ‘But how on earth could anyone have got toxic fumes into the old lady’s lungs?’ asked Sloan. There had been nothing but oxygen in the cylinder by Mrs Garamond’s bed; that had been checked.

  ‘Stony says you put your ethylene chlorhydrin into an alembic flask first …’

  ‘First catch your ethylene chlorhydrin, surely …’ said Sloan, who thought catching a hare would have been easier by half.

  ‘Not difficult,’ said Dr Dabbe. ‘It’s stable and cheap …’

  ‘All right,’ capitulated Sloan, ‘then what?’

  ‘Then, when you’ve got it under the victim’s nose all you have to do is to add some sodium hydroxide and – er – Bob’s your uncle. Or, more precisely,’ said Dr Dabbe, ‘what you might say is that it would be curtains for anyone breathing in the result. I say, Sloan,’ he added, ‘do you think “curtains” became a synonym for death because of the curtains in the crematorium or because they were drawn on stage after a play? “The rest is silence” and all that?’

  ‘The result?’ asked Sloan, pertinaceous policeman that he was. He thought that curtains had come to mean death because they used to be drawn when someone in the house had died. His grandmother had told him that – his grandmother and Wilfred Owen’s ‘And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds …’ He said again, ‘What result, doctor?’

  ‘The result of mixing sodium hydroxide with ethylene chlorhydrin,’ responded the pathologist, ‘chemically, will be ethylene oxide.’

  ‘Will it?’ said Sloan, more than a little uncertain of the spelling of what he should be getting down on paper.

  ‘And, Sloan, the important thing about ethylene oxide from your point of view …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is that it becomes a gas at ordinary temperatures.’

  ‘That’s important, is it, doctor?’ he said cautiously, wondering if he ought to ask the pathologist to spell ‘chlorhydrin’ for him or wait until the report came. The superintendent would be sure to ask.

  ‘Well, that and the fact that it’s fatal for whoever inhales it, of course. Neat, isn’t it?’ said Dr Dabbe. ‘Stony’s most interested – he doesn’t think it’s been done before.’

  ‘I hope not,’ said Sloan repressively.

  ‘But he’s pretty sure,’ said Dabbe. ‘Good chap, Stony. After dissecting that leg we went on to …’

  ‘How sure?’ enquired Sloan quickly.

  ‘Expert witness sure,’ said Dabbe concisely.

  ‘Ah …’ said Sloan, relieved. That meant that the pathologist’s friend didn’t mind being cross-examined in the witness box by all comers.

  ‘Actually,’ confided the pathologist, ‘he’s rather looking forward to it. He likes murder trials.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Sloan, ‘but first I’ve – er – got to catch my hare.’

  ‘Good hunting.’

  ‘Come to that, doctor, I’ve got to catch a missing heir, too – or, rather, heiress – of the old lady for the executrix,’ said Sloan. ‘Amelia Kennerley now tells me that there’s an illegitimate daughter unaccounted for, who’s a possible legatee into the bargain.’

  ‘Say on, Sloan …’

  ‘She’d be in her fifties now, if still alive, and,’ he went on, ‘I’ve still got to establish who this head-injury girl is …’

  There was a small silence at the other end of the telephone line and then Dr Dabbe said with quite uncharacteristic diffidence: ‘You couldn’t send me round some of her hair, could you, Sloan? Just a few strands …’

  EIGHTEEN

  Silent through summer, though other birds sing

  In their separate ways both Police Superintendent Leeyes and Detective Constable Crosby had some difficulty in coming to terms with Detective Inspector Sloan’s behaviour on the Wednesday morning.

  He spent it sitting at his desk in his office.

  Detective Constable Crosby was the first to disturb his reverie.

  ‘Where to this morning, sir?’ he asked from the door, car-keys at the ready.

  ‘Nowhere,’ said Sloan, ignoring a pile of reports on his desk. ‘Oh, Crosby, you could go and check that nothing more on the whereabouts of Miss Kate Camus has come in.’

  ‘If she was important, sir, wouldn’t the old lady have had her address?’

  ‘Perhaps, Crosby. And if wishes were horses, beggars could ride.’

  ‘Sir?’ He sounded injured.

  ‘One, we don’t know that Miss Kate Camus remained unmarried – she could be Mrs Anybody for all we know – and two, Mrs Garamond’s address book, if she had one, isn’t at the Grange any more. We checked.’

  ‘Stolen?’

  ‘Very probably.’

  ‘To stop us finding her?’

  ‘Or to enable others to find her.’

  ‘First?’

  ‘That is among my worries, Crosby.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘The fact that Miss Camus was of an age to be working during the last war means that she, too, will no longer be young.’

  ‘If she’s still alive,’ said Crosby.

  ‘But,’ pronounced Sloan, ‘the fact that if she is alive she will now be old does not mean that she is not entitled to live out her days as she wishes rather than have them truncated by violence as would seem to have happened in the case of Octavia Garamond.’ Sloan waved a report in his hand. ‘Dr Dabbe and his friend Professor Agate seem sure that Mrs Garamond was murdered.’

  ‘Yes, sir. So am I.’

  Sloan looked up, surprised. ‘You are, are you? Why so sure?’

  ‘Men in pubs don’t ask total strangers to drink with them by way of a celebration at the end of the evening,’ said Crosby simply. ‘It’s not natural. They’d do it when they first came in, wouldn’t they? Stands to reason.’

  ‘True,’ agreed Sloan. Perhaps they’d make a detective of Crosby one day after all.

  ‘I reckon, sir, that he slipped Mrs Shirley Doves a Micky Finn so she’d sleep extra
well that night.’

  ‘Then you’d better check on how the description of your stranger with something to celebrate jibes with that of all the other males in the case. Except the doctor. Mrs Doves knew him.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Crosby, jangling the car-keys hopefully. ‘And then?’

  ‘And then you can come and help me with some paperwork,’ said Sloan, thus ensuring a prolonged absence on Crosby’s part. ‘I’m going to be working on two lists – what we know and what we don’t know.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And one list is a good deal longer than the other …’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘In fact, what we know would go on one side of a piece of paper.’

  ‘We do know there’s something that someone’s looking quite hard for,’ said Crosby. ‘And small.’

  ‘But not what it is.’

  ‘Something pretty valuable, though, sir, or there wouldn’t have been all this fuss.’

  ‘If by “fuss”, Crosby, you mean murder, then yes, valuable to someone.’

  ‘But we don’t know who, do we, sir?’

  ‘Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs, perhaps.’

  ‘Or someone there,’ said Crosby, who had difficulty in grasping the concept of corporate identity. Or responsibility.

  ‘And Harris and Marsh’s,’ said Sloan.

  ‘Or someone there, too,’ said Crosby.

  ‘But what we don’t yet know,’ he said, ‘is whether something is being sought with a view to suppressing it …’

  ‘Like those ever-lasting electric light bulbs that they’re always on about?’

  ‘Just like that,’ agreed Sloan. ‘Or whether what they are looking for is something that they could exploit.’

  ‘Even if it’s not theirs?’ said Crosby.

  Detective Inspector Sloan said: ‘If the discovery was made at Chernwoods’ by people on the staff there when they made it, then I should have thought that it belonged to Chernwoods’. Which might account for Harris and Marsh’s wanting to buy them so badly.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘They call them intellectual property rights these days but in the old days it was likely to be known as copyright or patent.’

  Crosby’s brow cleared. ‘I see, sir. And so if Harris and Marsh’s did take over Chernwood’s then it would be theirs instead to do what they liked with?’

  ‘You’ve got it in one, Crosby,’ said Sloan, mellowly, privately hoping that the superintendent could – and would – follow the same line of reasoning without too much argument.

  ‘So what’s this Miss Camus got to do with it?’

  ‘My guess,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, ‘is that Miss Kate Camus is now the only person alive who can tell us or anybody else what all this is about.’ He amended this just as the telephone began to ring. ‘Miss Camus and Dr Dabbe …’

  ‘This funeral on Friday afternoon, Sloan,’ began Leeyes as soon as that luckless officer put his head round the police superintendent’s door. ‘Do you want it stopped?’

  ‘No, thank you, sir,’ said Sloan politely.

  ‘No?’ A pair of bushy eyebrows shot up.

  ‘No – I mean, Friday afternoon will do very well, thank you, sir.’

  ‘Even though our friendly neighbourhood pathologist says it’s a murder case?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Especially because of that. He says he has all he needs for the Coroner.’

  ‘And you’ve listed everyone with the knowledge that pouring one of these chemicals on to another would produce something nasty?’

  ‘I have,’ said Sloan. ‘It’s a long one. Including her doctor,’ he added meticulously. ‘Mrs Octavia Garamond was murdered by someone knowledgeable about chemistry.’ He forbore to say in this case this was a factor which widened the field of suspects, rather than narrowed it.

  ‘You’re not hoping, Sloan, are you,’ Leeyes boomed sarcastically, ‘that the days of miracles are not yet over and that someone will find the occasion of the funeral emotionally too much for them and stand up and confess?’

  ‘No, sir, but I would like Woman Police Sergeant Perkins out there at Great Primer on Friday.’

  ‘Need your hand holding, do you?’

  ‘I need a woman there,’ said Sloan seriously, adding, ‘and not in uniform.’

  ‘Disguised as what?’ Leeyes asked.

  ‘A newspaper reporter from the Luston News.’

  Leeyes grunted. ‘That shouldn’t be too difficult for Pretty Polly Perkins.’

  ‘No, sir.’ Sloan was confident that on Friday afternoon Woman Police Sergeant Perkins, if asked, would look every inch the provincial newspaper reporter.

  ‘And this girl in hospital?’

  ‘Not too good, sir.’

  ‘That means hanging by a thread, I suppose.’ Leeyes interpreted the hospital report with ease.

  ‘She hasn’t come round at all.’

  ‘And you still don’t know who she is?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘So …’

  ‘So, sir, we’re going on with our search for an old lady called Kate Camus, last heard of just after the end of the war when she left Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs, destination unknown.’

  ‘It’s an uncommon name.’

  ‘She may have changed it, of course.’

  ‘She may be dead.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Leeyes said: ‘And she may not know anything useful.’

  ‘True, sir.’ He coughed. ‘Or she may have been murdered, too, but somehow I don’t think so.’

  ‘All right, all right, Sloan. I’ll buy it. Why don’t you think she’s been murdered like Mrs Garamond?’

  ‘Because,’ said Sloan soberly, ‘she can’t be found.’

  ‘And can we find her?’

  ‘We’re trying very hard, sir. We’re pulling out all the stops but we may not be the only people looking. That’s the trouble.’

  ‘Come home and be killed?’

  ‘Something like that, sir.’ He added slowly: ‘I wouldn’t like us to have done the finding and then have someone else do the killing.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I’m – er – holding my horses until the funeral.’

  Claude Miller was not so much holding his horses for the funeral as limbering up. He soon sent for his information officer and librarian.

  ‘Greg, I think I told you I’d offered to say a few words at Mrs Garamond’s funeral.’

  ‘You did,’ said Rosart, without any noticeable enthusiasm.

  ‘I’ll need some background material.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Miller. I’ll dig out some facts for you. Dates and so forth.’

  ‘I hear that Michael Harris is going to be there.’ The girl on their switchboard and her cousin at Harris and Marsh’s had proved invaluable sources of information when the two principals were officially only communicating through their solicitors.

  ‘Our Michael wouldn’t want to miss an occasion like that,’ agreed Rosart, ‘to say nothing of getting his name in the papers.’

  ‘After all,’ said Miller, already straightening his tie, ‘the old lady was one of the jewels in Chernwoods’ crown in the old days …’

  ‘I think something a little more factual would be more in order, Mr Miller, when you actually speak.’

  ‘Right,’ said the chairman in what he liked to think were tones of command. ‘You go ahead and put something on paper for me and I’ll get in touch with the family …’

  ‘Family?’ Greg Rosart started. ‘There’s just the great-niece that I know about.’

  ‘That’s right. I say, Greg, what about a shot of us all going into the church? Or coming out? Do you think you could lay it on? Just for the record, of course …’

  NINETEEN

  Bury him comrades, in pitiful duty.

  The men carrying the coffin on the Friday – Tod Morton’s men – paused as in days of yore at the lich-gate of St Hilary’s church at Great Primer while two large wreaths were placed on it. One was of red ros
es and the other of white and Amelia had chosen the colours.

  The lich-gate where the cortège had halted had provided shelter and somewhere to sit in olden times when the cortège – without benefit of clock or writing – had had to wait upon the arrival of the cleric to take the burial service.

  It wasn’t like that any more.

  The Reverend Edwin Fournier was already present, robed and cloaked, awaiting the coffin and ready to greet the mourners with what Amelia always thought of as ‘comfortable words’.

  What was not so comfortable was the knowledge that behind the immemorial churchyard yews there lurked men who were not mourners but policemen. Before Christianity the yew, then almost the only evergreen tree in England, had been a symbol of everlasting life in its own account. Today those yews in this country churchyard were providing cover for plain-clothes detectives on watch.

  ‘Right, miss,’ said Tod Morton, touching Amelia’s shoulder. ‘We’re ready now.’

  The crunch of feet in unison on gravel was all that Amelia actually heard but her head was full of sounds and images and she felt a good deal more shakiness about the legs than she would have admitted to – even to Phoebe.

  As the cortège entered the church the well-built lady from the newspaper finished her taking of names in the church porch – an old-fashioned custom of which no doubt Great-Aunt Octavia would have approved – and found herself a seat at the back of the church.

  Detective Inspector Sloan had heeded the superintendent’s advice and was somewhere near the back at the other side of the church. For reasons known only to the constabulary, Detective Constable Crosby was seated very near the front at the end of the side pew nearest to the vestry door.

  It took Amelia a moment or two to adjust her eyes to the relative dimness inside the church after the bright sunlight of the churchyard. She blinked and then followed the little procession up the aisle. Tod Morton ushered her to the front pew and the Reverend Edwin Fournier began the Order of Service for the Burial of the Dead.

  Before very long Amelia Kennerley found what countless others before her had done, that the front pew was not a good vantage point from which to study the congregation. She did, however, have from where she sat a very good view of the Lady Chapel. The names on the war memorial there – bitter bone of contention that it had been between priest and parishioner – were of men of the East Calleshire Regiment but there was no doubt in Amelia’s mind now that it was a certain Second Lieutenant E. H. Goudy of the ill-fated Fearnshires whom Great-Aunt Octavia had had in mind when she knelt there. Not, from all accounts, that her marriage to her own mother’s uncle William Garamond had been unhappy.