Past Tense

by Catherine Aird

  What Janet stifled now sounded suspiciously like a sob.

  ‘Now,’ he said firmly, ‘if I’m not going to mess up tomorrow I must get some sleep. Goodnight!’

  Janet Wakefield lay on her back, very still, for a long time, pursuing an elusive memory. It was a long time after that before she fell into an uneasy sleep.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Years of working in the law had taught Simon Puckle, country solicitor, the virtues of routine and punctuality. Thus he went through the same procedures every morning when he arrived for work. First on his agenda was what he had come to think of as a colloquy with Miss Florence Fennel. She would arrive armed with the morning post, each missive carefully annotated and awaiting his instructions. These duly given, talk would turn to ongoing matters.

  ‘And Joseph Short,’ finished Miss Fennel, who never used the diminutives of names as a matter of principle and never omitted a surname, ‘has telephoned from the Bellingham to say that having now got his permit to travel he has fixed up a provisional return flight to Lasserta for late tomorrow afternoon. That is unless we require him to extend his stay for any reason.’

  ‘I don’t think we do, do we?’ said Simon Puckle, frowning. ‘We can send the probate papers and anything else that needs signing out to him.’

  ‘In due course,’ supplemented Miss Fennel automatically. ‘We mustn’t forget there are those letters and photographs that the nursing home sent round yesterday.’

  ‘Get him to call round and pick them up before he goes, then. We don’t really want them here. Now, what time do I have to be at the magistrates’ court?’

  Work relating to their activities at Berebury Police Station had begun in a rather less orderly fashion, the virtues of a daily routine only kicking in when everything was quiet in the town. Early as it had been when the police had called at The Old Post Office in Staple St James it was only to find that William Wakefield had already left for his firm’s head office in London.

  ‘His wife was still in bed, though, when we got there,’ reported Detective Inspector Sloan to an acerbic Superintendent Leeyes.

  ‘That’s not my idea of a dawn raid,’ observed Leeyes irascibly.

  ‘We got her up,’ offered Sloan, the only palliative that came to mind.

  ‘It isn’t his wife we wanted to talk to, Sloan,’ rasped Leeyes. ‘You know that. It wasn’t the hen bird that had flown.’

  Sloan acknowledged the witticism with a wintry smile. ‘Janet Wakefield explained to us that they had both been at the Bellingham Hotel all the evening before with Joseph Short which is why we didn’t find her husband at home then.’

  ‘Wakefield sounds like that damned elusive pimpernel to me,’ grumbled Leeyes. ‘Has he gone straight to his office this morning like she said he had or is he going walkabout in London like the last time he was there? I hope you’ve checked on that?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Sloan. ‘Wakefield’s at his office, all right. I’ve just checked that with them.’

  ‘Well, I hope he stays there until he comes home and that you interview him as soon as he does.’ Leeyes changed tack. ‘Did you get anything out of your interview with the other fellow – Joe Short?’

  ‘Not a lot. If he’s a wrong ’un it doesn’t show. And he did hire a car at the airport on the morning of the funeral, like he said, and not at any other time in his name that the Met can establish. And the photograph we’ve had back from his firm, Cartwright’s Carbons, in Lasserta is definitely of him. He had all his answers off pat, too.’

  ‘I don’t like the sound of that, Sloan,’ pounced the superintendent immediately. ‘Not natural.’

  ‘You could say he ticked all the right boxes when we talked to him, sir. And he insisted that he’d handed over to us all those funeral cards from the undertaker.’

  ‘No way of telling, of course,’ grunted Leeyes. ‘Or even whether she filled one in.’

  ‘No, sir, but we haven’t established any connection between him and Lucy Lansdown, or come to that between the girl and William Wakefield either. Not yet, anyway. No one of his name seems to have hired a car the night that the girl went into the river. All her brother could tell us was that she’d had an unhappy love affair a few years ago but he didn’t know who with and he’d definitely never met the man in question. He didn’t know anything about him at all.’

  ‘Brothers,’ pronounced the Superintendent sagely, ‘never understand their sisters’ love lives and never will.’

  ‘Quite so, sir. I’ll talk to him properly as soon as he arrives in Berebury, of course.’

  ‘And keep trying with both Wakefield and Short, Sloan. This is a murder case, remember, not petty theft.’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten, sir,’ promised Sloan, making for his own office with a certain relief.

  Some good news awaited him there.

  ‘Cast your bread upon the waters, Crosby,’ began Detective Inspector Sloan, a sheet of paper in his hands, as the constable entered with two steaming mugs of coffee.

  ‘And it will be returned to you as sandwiches,’ rejoined Crosby irreverently.

  ‘Actually, Crosby, I had in mind a more general observation on the merits of following police procedure to the letter.’

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  ‘And the importance of attention to detail.’

  ‘Naturally, sir,’ he said solemnly. ‘It’s worked, then, has it?’

  Sloan smoothed out a message sheet lying on his desk. ‘I am happy to say that the good practice of our routine general circulation of jewellers and pawnbrokers has paid off in spades.’

  ‘The rings?’ deduced Crosby.

  Sloan read out aloud, ‘An eternity ring, answering to the description of one of the three rings as outlined in your circular of yesterday’s date, was offered for sale to Tatton’s, the jewellers, in Luston High Street today for cash by an unknown young man.’

  ‘Testing the market?’ said Crosby.

  ‘Just so,’ said Sloan.

  ‘A young man who happened to be too shy to leave his name and address?’ enquired the detective constable.

  ‘You’ve got it in one, Crosby. Moreover – surprise, surprise – when pressed to write these details in their ledger, he took his departure with speed, and the ring, of course.’

  Sloan’s train of thought was interrupted by the latent memory of the unpopular pedant who had taught him English grammar at school. That he’d just committed a grammatical solecism, he knew, but what he couldn’t remember was which one. There had been a phrase…recollection came flooding back after a moment: ‘The man dropped a sigh and a sixpence’ – that was it. The schoolmaster had called that a condensed sentence and quoted a famous playwright: ‘Cut the second act and that child’s throat.’ In the playground afterwards he and his friends had dreamt up some more, schoolboy humour well to the fore, and better forgotten. He came back to the present with a jerk as Crosby spoke. ‘What was that you said, Crosby?’

  ‘Is there any description of the man, sir?’ For once Crosby had his notebook at the ready.

  ‘Some,’ said Sloan, reading aloud from the message sheet. ‘Medium height, brown hair and nondescript clothes. And hood, of course,’ he added, since this item of apparel seemed to be de rigueur these days among the urban young of a lawbreaking disposition. ‘However, Crosby, fortunately Tatton’s, who were not born yesterday in spite of the venerable age of their firm, possess a hidden camera with which they record a photographic image of all the customers who come into their shop.’

  ‘Matthew Steele?’ hazarded Crosby. He started to get to his feet. ‘I could go over to Luston and get that picture, sir…it wouldn’t take me long.’

  ‘I’m sure it wouldn’t,’ said Sloan, ‘but I’m happy to say that an image is on its way and will reach us even more quickly by computer.’

  Crosby subsided back into his chair, a disappointed man. ‘There’s a general call out for Matthew Steele already so…’

  ‘So there’s nothing more to be done
about him for the time being,’ said Sloan.

  ‘Except keep an eye open,’ said Crosby.

  ‘Except keep an eye on his home,’ Sloan corrected him wearily. ‘Bad boys always come home in the end.’ That was something else he had learnt long ago on the beat.

  ‘Those rings must be worth a real bomb or he’s got a drug dealer putting on the frighteners in a big way.’

  ‘Both, probably,’ agreed Sloan sourly.

  Detective Constable Crosby leant back in his chair and started to count off his fingers. ‘So first he breaks into the nursing home and finds the body gone, and so he tries to get into the undertaker’s next and can’t, so then he goes for the grave.’

  ‘No,’ said Sloan.

  ‘No?’ Crosby looked puzzled.

  ‘Well, yes and no,’ said Sloan since he wasn’t talking to the superintendent now. ‘No, he doesn’t break into the nursing home because in the first place he wouldn’t need to, knowing where the keys are kept, and in the second place getting in there the night before the funeral would have been too late. The body wouldn’t have been there by then.’

  ‘So why didn’t he break in there while it was?’ asked Crosby simply.

  ‘Probably because his mother didn’t mention until after it had happened that the rings had gone with the body to the undertaker’s. She knows him even better than we do, remember.’

  ‘So somebody else broke in there,’ concluded Crosby slowly, ‘someone who wasn’t looking for the rings.’

  ‘Exactly, Crosby.’

  ‘So what were they looking for?’

  ‘If, Crosby, we knew that I think we would know the answer to everything.’ At this stage Sloan wasn’t at all sure what the word ‘everything’ comprised. If he knew that, too, it would help. What he seemed to be investigating at the moment was a complicated melange of things that were not quite right. First and foremost of these was the death of a young woman called Lucy Lansdown. This had been about the time, not yet determined, of the disturbing of a grave contrary to the Burial Act of 1852, which forbade any such thing, thus leading to the theft of valuable property. He reminded himself that he must not forget a successful break-in at another place – the nursing home – and an attempted break-in at a quite different place – the undertaker’s – to say nothing of the search of the dead young woman’s house by person or persons unknown. It was, though, quite enough to be getting on with.

  ‘They wouldn’t have broken in to that nursing home for nothing, would they, sir? Without a reason, I mean. Whoever they are.’

  ‘No.’ That much was certain.

  His brow furrowed, Crosby thought hard. ‘If there was nothing valuable left in there…’

  ‘Nothing intrinsically valuable,’ amended Sloan.

  ‘All right,’ agreed Crosby, conceding this, ‘then it must have been for something that someone didn’t want found there.’

  ‘Keep going, Crosby.’

  ‘Like a photograph of Lucy Lansdown?’

  ‘Could be. Too soon to say but that would be the sort of missing link between Josephine Short and Lucy Lansdown that we’re looking for.’ Detective Inspector Sloan turned his attention back to the message sheet from the jeweller’s at Luston. ‘There’s something else interesting, Crosby. Tatton’s, the jewellers, who are very experienced in these matters, had noticed the names inside the eternity ring before they handed them back to the customer. Indeed, they say they had actually pointed out to the customer that the names lowered the resale value.’

  ‘Really?’ The constable didn’t sound too interested. ‘I didn’t know that they did.’

  ‘Think, Crosby,’ he said, exasperated now. ‘Difficult, surely, to present it to the love of your life as new if it’s got someone else’s names engraved in it. Even you ought to be able to work that out.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Sloan bent over the message sheet again. ‘The names inscribed inside the eternity ring were Josephine and George, entwined.’

  ‘Soppy,’ said Crosby, unmarried and rather gauche.

  ‘Sentimental,’ said Sloan, married long since but still able to remember the uncertain swain he had been once upon a time. That girl in the blue dress had taken quite some winning.

  ‘Same difference.’ Crosby shrugged his shoulders indifferently.

  ‘Josephine Short,’ said Sloan, still a policeman, ‘called her son George.’

  ‘After his father, then, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. But George Peter Arden Short was certainly the name of Joseph Short’s father,’ said Sloan, stirred by a memory of something he couldn’t quite place. ‘And Joe’s middle name is Arden, too.’ Idly, Sloan wondered if both – if all three – had the family face, whatever that might have been. He’d been made to learn a poem called ‘Heredity’ by Thomas Hardy about that very thing, by that same schoolmaster. Since the penalty for failing to do so in those days involved the cane, the words easily came back to him now:

  ‘I am the family face; Flesh perishes, I live on, Projecting trait and trace Through time to times anon

  And leaping from place to place Over oblivion.’

  Moreover, learning this for his English homework had not in his fourteen-year-old mind been something any self-respecting schoolboy should have had to do. He’d resented it, too, because in his opinion then Thomas Hardy was for girls. He sighed and said now, ‘One more thing, Crosby, before we get going.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘William Wakefield. I still want a question and answer session with that man as soon as we can catch up with him and before he hoofs it back to Brazil. He must be interviewed the minute he gets back to Berebury. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And as for Joe Short…’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘We need to make quite sure that no ill befalls him before he goes back to his benighted island.’

  The question of whether married subjects of either sex should be interviewed separately or in the presence of each other had always been a debatable one at the police station. Had he been asked, Detective Inspector Sloan would have taken a pragmatic view. Sometimes, he would have said, it helped to note the body language of one partner while the other one was being questioned, sometimes it was valuable for the one not to know what the other had said.

  Much the same applied to encounters with the medical profession.

  Which side of the debate succeeded with the police often depended on which member of the force was accompanying the interviewer. In the case of Detective Constable Crosby, Sloan was in no doubt. He was better without him. However, proper police procedure required that Sloan had someone with him when he questioned William Wakefield over the matter of his late return to the Erroll Garden Hotel the night after the funeral – or, rather, his failure to mention the fact when interviewed earlier.

  And so it was with Crosby at his side that Sloan returned to The Old Post Office at Staple St James following at a discreet distance an unsuspecting William Wakefield back home after he came off the London train.

  ‘We’d just like to run over a few things, sir,’ said Sloan to William Wakefield overtaking the man as he walked up the garden path to his house. ‘To make sure we’ve got it right.’

  ‘Sure, Inspector.’ The man seemed unalarmed. ‘Come along in. I expect Jan’s got the kettle on.’

  Finding the door locked, Wakefield let them in with his own house key. Not only did Janet Wakefield not have the kettle on but she wasn’t there.

  ‘Funny,’ said Bill Wakefield. ‘I thought she’d guess I’d be on this train. I expect she’s gone round to her friend, Dawn. Something must have cropped up because she didn’t meet me at the station.’ He led the way to the kitchen and put the kettle on himself.

  ‘What we are investigating, sir,’ said Sloan, ‘are your movements the night you got back from Brazil.’

  He turned to face him. ‘I told you, Inspector. I checked in to the Erroll Garden Hotel.’

  ‘What you d
idn’t tell us, sir, is that you went out again after that. Would you like to tell us where you went?’

  William Wakefield glanced round the room as if to make sure that the three of them were alone. He took a deep breath and said, ‘Only if you promise not to tell my wife.’

  ‘I can’t give you any specific undertaking of any sort,’ said Sloan steadily, ‘and I would remind you that we are investigating a matter of the utmost seriousness.’

  The man wasn’t really listening. ‘You could say,’ he said slowly, ‘that I was being taught a lesson. Well, having one anyway.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘My wife and I have been trying to start a family. Having fertility treatment and all that.’

  ‘Brazil’s a long way away,’ observed Crosby in a detached manner.

  ‘When I’m at home,’ he said with dignity.

  ‘And?’ said Sloan.

  ‘And the doctor johnnies always try to pin the blame on the wife, willy-nilly. Or so they say. But they shouldn’t. Not always.’

  ‘The male ego being a tender plant?’ suggested Sloan. This was something no policeman needed to be told: it was demonstrated most Saturday nights by alcohol-fuelled punch-ups in the town centre.

  ‘I thought perhaps someone else might be able to help,’ said William Wakefield simply.

  ‘Someone with very wide experience?’ suggested Sloan expressionlessly.

  ‘All right, then, Inspector.’ He opened his hands in a gesture of defeat. ‘Have it your way. A lady of the night.’

  ‘And did she?’ enquired Crosby with interest.

  William Wakefield favoured him with a long look and then his face suddenly burst into a grin and he yelped, ‘And how!’ He gave Sloan a playful dig in the ribs. ‘I’m going to tell that supercilious medic that he only told me the half of it.’

  ‘Not a mariage blanc, surely?’ said the superintendent, pursing his lips.

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Sloan ambiguously. ‘That’s his story, anyway,’ he added, deliberately vague.